The Ideal of Culture Essays

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.

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.

Introduction

I. The 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

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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