"The three decades that followed World War II were an exceptionally fertile period for American essays. The explosion of journals and magazines, the rise of public intellectuals, and breakthroughs in the arts inspired a flowering of literary culture. At the same time, the many problems that confronted mid-century America--racism, sexism, nuclear threat, war, poverty, and environmental degradation among them--proved fruitful topics for America's best minds. In The Golden Age of the American Essay, Phillip Lopate assembles a dazzling array of famous writers, critics, sociologists, theologians, historians, activists, theorists, humorists, poets, and novelists. Here are writers like James Agee, E. B. White, A. J. Liebling, Randall Jarrell, and Mary McCarthy, pivoting from the comic indignities of daily life to world peace, consumerism, and restaurants in Paris. Here is Norman Mailer on Jackie Kennedy, Vladimir Nabokov on Lolita, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," and Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Here are Gore Vidal, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Joan Didion, and many more, in a treasury of brilliant writing that has stood the test of time." -Amazon.

Anchor Books proudly launches an annual essay series. Acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate has selected the most surprising, important, and exquisite pieces published during the last twelve months. Bringing together materials from both periodicals and books, The Anchor Essay Annual 1997 also includes essays never before published, as well as translations from abroad. The result is as rich and unique as it is cosmopolitan. In her brilliantly frank "Revelation", Mary Gaitskill recounts the religious epiphany that changed her life. Hilton Als explores the "Negressity" of his soul in "My Pin-Up". In his dazzling "The Laying Off of Desire", Jean Baudrillard sets forth a flamboyant dissection of human sexuality. Hubert Butler ruminates on the stunted life of his handicapped grandchild in "Little K." We relive the glories and disappointments of the Borscht Belt in Vivian Gornick's evocative group portrait, "The Catskills Remembered". And we ride a rollercoaster of cultural insight in Daniel Harris's "A Psychosexual History of the Homosexual Body". A a whole, this superb collection is a heady cocktail indeed. All of this exciting new work is placed in context with an illuminating introduction from Phillip Lopate, "the house authority on the genre and its greatest practitioner" ( Washington Times ). With generous selections from over twenty-five writers from around the world, The Anchor Essay Annual 1997 is the first in what is sure to become a series widely anticipated and highly acclaimed, every October, for years to come.