THE TEN GREATEST ESSAYS, EVER
JEFF SHARLET
Jane Addams, “The Devil-Baby at Hull House”
(from The Atlantic, 1916)
Zora Neale Hurston, “Hoodoo in America”
(from Journal of American Folklore, 1931)
Meridel Le Sueur, “I Was Marching”
(from The New Masses, 1935)
Mary McCarthy, “Artists in Uniform”
(from Harper’s, 1953)
James Baldwin, “Down at the Cross”
(from The Fire Next Time, Dial Press, 1963)
Joseph Mitchell, “Joe Gould’s Secret”
(from The New Yorker, 1964)
Ellen Willis, “Next Year in Jerusalem”
(from Rolling Stone, 1977)
Michael Lesy, “Slaughterhouse”
(from The Forbidden Zone, FSG, 1987)
Lauren Slater, “Striptease”
(from Welcome to My Country, Random House, 1996)
Michael Warner, “Tongues Untied”
(from Que(e)rying Religion, Continuum, 1997)
JoAnn Wypijewski, “Judgment Days”
(from Harper’s, 2006)
ABOUT JEFF SHARLET
Jeff Sharlet is the author of five books, including Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country In-Between; C-Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy; and the international best-seller The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. His work regularly appears in Harper’s, Rolling Stone, New York, and The New Republic, and has been recognized with the Molly Ivins National Journalism Prize, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission’s Outspoken Award, The Military Religious Freedom Foundation’s Thomas Jefferson Award, and the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association Award for Excellence in Feature Writing. The founding editor of the journals Killing the Buddha and The Revealer, he now teaches creative writing at Dartmouth College.