Word: essayistic
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Galloping Elegance. Now, at 50, "Woody" Broun has settled into a comfortable niche that takes advantage of his talents as actor, writer and learned wit. He is the "sports essayist" on CBS's Saturday Evening News, and compared with the breathless, cliche-riddled attack of the athletes-turned-commentators, his relaxed, reflective reports are easily the best sportscasting on TV. Sprinkled with quotes from Shelley and Browning, his stories are aimed at the average viewer rather than the batting-average viewer who dotes on statistics...
What William James called the "rich thicket of reality" is thoroughly explored in this book, which is subtitled "Thoughts During a Useless Time." Its author, Paul Goodman, is a novelist, poet, essayist, psychologist and social critic whose book Growing Up Absurd gave him guru status with a large segment of American youth. Five Years is a self-analytical journal of random thoughts, jotted down from 1955 to 1960, when Goodman was between 45 and 50 years old. It is a ruthlessly honest confession in the manner of Rousseau: Goodman recounts how he scrounged for food, sex and love while materially...
...PRELUDE: LANDSCAPES, CHARACTERS AND CONVERSATIONS FROM THE EARLIER YEARS OF MY LIFE, by Edmund Wilson. Turning to autobiography after 51 years as critic, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright and novelist, Wilson draws entries from a journal begun in 1914. The result is a rich account juxtaposing his growth as a writer with the breakdown of his snug prewar world...
Like Johnson, he is utterly professional, prolific and peripatetic. He is first of all a critic (Axel's Castle, Patriotic Gore) who transcends academic specialties with broad, humanistic learning and spirited eclecticism. He is also a journalist and essayist (The Bit Between My Teeth), an intellectual tourist (Europe Without Baedeker), a sociopolitical historian (To the Finland Station), and a fitfully effective poet, playwright and novelist (Memoirs of Hecate County). Through his weighty lucid sentences rumbles a Johnsonian authority whose trenchant insights are alloyed with grumpy good sense, and whose occasional wrongheadedness can be more interesting than many writers...
...Said Essayist Paul Goodman, a self-styled anarchist, in the current New York Review of Books: "Some kind of martial law and thousands of arrests for sedition are quite thinkable...