Who is the greatest living essayist writing in English? Joseph Epstein would surely be at the top of anybody's list. Epstein is penetrating. He is witty. He has a magic touch with words, that hard to define but immediately recognizable quality called style. Above all, he is impossible to put down.
Joseph Epstein's The Ideal of Culture: Essays is the fourth such volume from Axios Press and contains 63 essays. Subjects range from domestic life to current social trends to an appraisal of “contemporary nuttiness.” It follows the much acclaimed Essays in Biography, 2012, A Literary Education and Other Essays, 2014, and Wind Sprints: Shorter Essays, 2016.
After reading Epstein, we see life with a fresh eye. We also see ourselves a little more clearly. This is what Plutarch intended: life teaching by example, but with a wry smile and such a sure hand that we hardly notice the instruction. It is just pure pleasure.Joseph Epstein was formerly editor of the American Scholar. A long-time resident of Chicago, he has taught English and writing at Northwestern University for many years. He has written for numerous magazines including the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Weekly Standard and Commentary.
He is the author of 29 books, many of them collections of essays. His books include the bestselling Snobbery and Friendship as well as the short-story collections The Goldin Boys, Fabulous Small Jews, and The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff.Introduction
I. The Culture
The Ideal of Culture
From Parent to Parenthood
Death Takes No Holiday
Wit
Genius
Cowardice
Old Age and Other Laughs
What's So Funny?
The Fall of the WASPs
The Virtue of Victims
Cool
The Sixties
University of Chicago Days
II. Literary
Erich Auerbach
Kafka
Orwell
Proust
C. K. Scott Moncrieff
The Young T. S. Eliot
Philip Larkin
Willa Cather
George Kennan
Isaiah Berlin
Michael Oakeshott
John O'Hara
F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Most Successful Failure
Wolcott Gibbs
Evelyn Waugh
J. F. Powers
Edward Gibbon
Herodotus
Tacitus
Encyclopaedia Britannica – The Eleventh
Grammar
Clichés
Literary Rivals
Why Read Biography?
III. Jewish
Sholem Aleichem
Jokes A Genre of Thought
Jews on the Loose
Jewish Pugs
Harry Golden
Gershom Scholem
Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas
IV. Masterpieces
The Brothers Ashkenazi
Civilization of the Renaissance
Montesquieu
Machiavelli
Gogol
Speak, Memory
Epictetus
H. W. Fowler
As a Driven Leaf
Joseph and His Brothers
Life and Fate
Memoirs of Hadrian
Charnwood's Lincoln
Book of the Courtier
Ronald Syme
Quest for Corvo
The Old Bunch
The Life of Johnson
V. Hitting Eighty
Hitting Eighty
Epigraph
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