Robert Atwan

Summary

On Writing Three Decades of ‘Forewords’ for

The Best American Essays

When I began the series in 1986, I decided to contribute a ‘Foreword’ to each edition but I did so hesitantly. For one thing the publisher’s companion volume, The Best American Short Stories, did not include one, and so none was expected for the essays. For another, I was worried that – should the series be successful and continue – I would run out of things to say within a few years. So I decided to write forewords of just seven paragraphs and I stuck with that model, though with each new annual edition the paragraphs grew longer. Then with the 2002 volume I gradually began slightly expanding the forewords. The foreword to the 2020 book, which focuses on Gertrude Stein, is the longest in the series.

Although I may at times comment on some of the volume’s contents, I try in each foreword to say something about the essay as a literary genre – its forms, major practitioners, history, criticism, relevance, and so forth. I can’t recall ever knowing – that is, in an outline sense – what I was going to write until I was about to get started. I don’t possess an especially disciplined mind. My thoughts tend to wander and will sometimes cluster into an idea provoked by a serendipitous event. Here are two examples: in the 1993 foreword I was struck by a letter I received from Pakistan in an envelope covered front and back with postage stamps. The writer thanked me for the editions of Best American Essays he had discovered in a Lahore library that offered him the ‘best introduction of America, ever’. The remark – very appreciated, by the way – prompted me to write about the ways essays can offer readers a close acquaintance with a unfamiliar culture.

A second example: the April morning I sat down to begin the foreword to the 2017 edition, I had just come across a message in my inbox reminding me that this day marked the one hundredth anniversary of our entry into World War I. As I reflected on that moment, I thought of an essayist who powerfully opposed our participation in that conflict, Randolph Bourne.