Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | The Modern Essay - Modern Essayists

MODERN ESSAYISTS

Spencer Brown

SOURCE: "The Odor of Durability," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. LXXXVI, No. 1, Winter, 1978, pp. 146-52.

[Brown is an American poet and critic. In the following review, he commends the essays of E. B. White and John McPhee.]

Two of our foremost essayists have appeared almost simultaneously in retrospective volumes. E. B. White's selection from his own essays [Essays of E. B. White, 1977], is a companion to his collected letters published in 1976, and an anthology from John McPhee's dozen books [The John McPhee Reader, 1977], has been edited with great understanding and taste by William L. Howarth.

White describes himself alternately as essayist and as journalist. McPhee clearly considers himself a journalist. White being intensely personal and McPhee apparently impersonal, they have little in common but excellence and the same employer—the New Yorker, whose pages they...

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