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The Art of the Personal Essay (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present is an extensive collection of essays compiled by Phillip Lopate, an English professor at Hofstra University in New York City and himself the author of two essay collections. Here, Lopate has selected some seventy-five essays written by fifty authors—including himself—spanning the last two thousand years and representing cultures from all over the globe.

Lopate’s thirty-two-page introduction provides a detailed analysis of the personal essay as a literary form. According to Lopate, the...

[The entire page is 1585 words long]