A long-awaited and illuminating book on personal writing from Phillip Lopate—celebrated essayist, professor of writing at Columbia University, and editor of The Art of the Personal Essay.
Distinguished author Phillip Lopate, editor of the celebrated anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, is universally acclaimed as “one of our best personal essayists” (Dallas Morning News).
Here, combining more than forty years of lessons from his storied career as a writer and professor, he brings us this highly anticipated nuts-and-bolts guide to writing literary nonfiction.
A phenomenal master class shaped by Lopate’s informative, accessible tone and immense gift for storytelling, To Show and To Tell reads like a long walk with a favorite professor—refreshing, insightful, and encouraging in often unexpected ways.
Phillip Lopate is the author of more than a dozen books, including three personal essay collections, Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, Portrait of My Body, and Waterfront. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a winner of fellowships from the New York Public Library, National Endowment for the Arts, and Guggenheim, he is a professor of graduate nonfiction writing at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with his wife.
Table of Contents
Introduction vii
I The Craft of Personal Narrative 1
The State of Nonfiction Today 3
On the Necessity of Turning Oneself into a Character 17
Reflection and Retrospection: A Pedagogic Mystery Story 26
How Do You End an Essay? 45
The Uses of Contrariety 64
Imagination Thin and Thick 72
Facts Have Implications: or, Is Nonfiction Really Fiction? 77
On the Ethics of Writing about Others 82
Modesty and Assertion 86
On Writers' Journals 100
The Essay: Exploration or Argument? 107
The Made-Up Self: On the Difficulty of Turning Oneself into a Character 112
Research and Personal Writing 116
The Lyric Essay 122
The Personal Essay in the Age of Facebook 127
II Studies of Practitioners 133
Lamb's Essays of Elia 135
Hazlitt on Hating 147
How I Became an Emersonian 161
Teaching James Baldwin 179
Edward Hoagland: The Dean of American Essayists 188
“At last—a reliable guide to the signature genre of the age. Phillip Lopate's tour of literary nonfiction includes brilliant and helpful considerations of the essay and memoir, placing them and their vexing questions in clear cultural context. Impossible now to imagine a nonfiction course that does not include To Show and To Tell in its syllabus. This is the rule book. But it's much more than a "craft book" for writers. It's a delight in itself, a fascinating exploration for readers, for anyone wondering why personally voiced nonfiction is so popular. The range is impressive, and the voice here is immediate, fresh, witty, winningly honest. An indispensible book.”
author of The Made-Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay - Carl H. Klaus
“The work of a master, To Show and To Tell is beyond compare, for it embodies a poetics of literary nonfiction that takes into account all the crucial aspects, elements, and issues of the craft. Thus it's the essential text for anyone who seeks to enjoy, to understand, or to write nonfiction.”
