Happy Birthday, Cynthia Ozick
Born April 17, 1928, New York, NY
Today, the Best American Essays newsletter celebrates the ninety-seventh birthday of novelist, short story writer, and essayist Cynthia Ozick. The recipient of many awards and accolades, Ozick received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2000, the National Humanities Medal in 2007, and the PEN/Nabokov and PEN/Malamud awards in 2008. She was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2005. Her essays are widely published in the periodical literature. She was the guest editor of The Best American Essays 1998.
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“An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion in it, you need not trust it in the long run. A genuine essay has no educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play. Though it is written in prose, it is closer in kind to poetry than to any other form. Like a poem, a genuine essay is made out of language and character and mood and temperament and pluck and chance.”
“Essayists are a species of metaphysician: they are inquisitive—also analytic—about the least grain of being. Novelists go about the strenuous business of marrying and burying their people, or else they send them to sea, or to Africa, or (at the least) out of town. Essayists in their stillness ponder love and death.”
First published essay:
“The Wapshot Scandal, by John Cheever,” Commentary, July 1964.
Select nonfiction bibliography:
The Din in the Head: Essays (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006)
Fame & Folly: Essays (Knopf, 1996)
Metaphor & Memory (Knopf, 1989)
“A Drugstore in Winter,” in The Best American Essays of the Century, edited by Robert Atwan and Joyce Carol Oates, originally titled “Spells, Wishes, Goldfish, Old School Hurts,” reprinted from The New York Times Book Review, 1982.
See also:
Watch this episode of The Civil Discourse, with Cynthia Ozick, August 2024.
Watch Cynthia Ozick in conversation with Lore Segal at the 92nd Street Y, April 2024.
Watch Cynthia Ozick and Nicole Kraus reading at the 92nd Street Y, November 2010.
Listen to Afternoon Night Table: Cynthia Ozick and Roger Rosenblatt, the 92nd Street Y, October 2008.
Visit the collection of Cynthia Ozick papers at Yale University.
Read “Cynthia Ozick, Smasher of Idols,” by Giles Harvey, The New Yorker, April 2021.
Read “The Canon as Cannon,” Walter Kirn, The New York Times, July 2006
Read “Cynthia Ozick: Aesthete,” Sanford Pinsker, The Partisan Review, 2002