Best of
Essays

1963

Letter from the Birmingham Jail


Martin Luther King Jr. - 1963
    rarely had time to answer his critics. But on April 16, 1963, he was confined to the Birmingham jail, serving a sentence for participating in civil rights demonstrations. "Alone for days in the dull monotony of a narrow jail cell," King pondered a letter that fellow clergymen had published urging him to drop his campaign of nonviolent resistance and to leave the battle for racial equality to the courts. In response, King drafted his most extensive and forceful written statement against social injustice - a remarkable essay that focused the world's attention on Birmingham and spurred the famous March on Washington. Bristling with the energy and resonance of his great speeches, Letter from the Birmingham Jail is both a compelling defense of nonviolent demonstration and a rallying cry for an end to social discrimination that is just as powerful today as it was more than twenty years ago.

The Fire Next Time


James Baldwin - 1963
    At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two “letters,” written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as “sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle…all presented in searing, brilliant prose,” The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.

Letter from Birmingham Jail


Martin Luther King Jr. - 1963
    There is an alternate edition published under ISBN13: 9780062509550. 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.' This landmark missive from one of the greatest activists in history calls for direct, non-violent resistance in the fight against racism, and reflects on the healing power of love.This edition also contains the sermon 'The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life'.

The Educated Imagination


Northrop Frye - 1963
    Dr. Frye offers, in addition, challenging and stimulating ideas for the teaching of literature at lower school levels, designed both to promote an early interest and to lead the student to the knowledge and kaleidoscopic experience found in the study of literature.Dr. Frye's proposals for the teaching of literature include an early emphasis on poetry, the "central and original literary form," intensive study of the Bible, as literature, and the Greek and Latin classics, as these embody all the great enduring themes of western man, and study of the great literary forms: tragedy and comedy, romance and irony.

The Ordeal of Change


Eric Hoffer - 1963
    Self-taught, his appetite for knowledge--history, science, mankind--formed the basis of his insight to human nature. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hoffer's seminal work, The Ordeal of Change, essays on the duality and essentiality of change in man throughout history.

Meditations on a Hobby Horse: And Other Essays on the Theory of Art


E.H. Gombrich - 1963
    Prompted by modern critical discussions, the 14 papers, lectures and articles assembled in this volume revolve around key issues raised by twentieth-century art and theory.Taking abstraction and expression as his main themes, this eclectic assortment of Professor Gombrich's monumental essays encompass the whole of the history of art, and includes major articles on the social history of art, visual metaphor, tradition and expression, and psychoanalysis.Characteristic of his thought-provoking use of diverse sources for inspiration and exploration, this book embodies a timelessly powerful corpus of Gombrich's ground-breaking thought.

The Firstborn


Laurie Lee - 1963
    His poems are vivid and sensuous. In Cider with Rosie he recalls the unspoilt country of his childhood; and in this deeply moving essay Laurie Lee writes of the birth of his first child."This moment of meeting seemed to be a birthtime for both of us; her first and my second life. Nothing I knew would be the same again...She is of course just an ordinary miracle, but is also the late wonder of my life. So each night I take her to bed like a book and lie close and study her".

The Negro Protest: James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Talk with Kenneth B. Clark


Kenneth Bancroft Clark - 1963
    Clark, noted Negro pyschologist & author of Prejudice & Your Child, for National Educational Television & were produced by Henry Morgenthau with the staff of WGBH-TV in Cambridge, MA. For this book, Dr Clark has written a brief commentary on the interviews & the men he talked to.

November Twenty Six Nineteen Hundred Sixty Three


Wendell Berry - 1963
    A poem by Wendell Berry illustrated by the artist Ben Shahn consisting of full page line and wash drawings.

Metaphors On Vision


Stan Brakhage - 1963
    an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green?'" So begins Stan Brakhage's (1933-2003) classic Metaphors on Vision. Originally published in 1963 by Jonas Mekas as a special issue of Film Culture, and designed by George Maciunas, it stands as the major theoretical statement by one of avant-garde cinema's most influential figures, a treatise on mythopoeia and the nature of visual experience written in a style as idiosyncratic as his art. Long out of print, the volume is now available in this definitive edition from Anthology Film Archives and Light Industry, featuring Brakhage's complete text in its distinctive original layout, as well as annotations by scholar P. Adams Sitney.

For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction


Alain Robbe-Grillet - 1963
    For a New Novel reevaluates the techniques, ethos, and limits of contemporary fiction. This is a work of immense importance for any discussions of the history of the novel, and for contemporary thinking about the future of fiction.