Happy Birthday, Phillip Lopate
Born November 16, 1943, Brooklyn, NY
Today, the Best American Essays newsletter celebrates the eighty-first birthday of author, critic, teacher, and anthologist Phillip Lopate, who has been a champion of the personal essay for over forty years. His work has been reprinted three times in The Best American Essays series and listed as Notable twenty-one times.
Subscribe to our newsletter for news about upcoming online conversations with Best American Essays contributors about essayists.
“Instead of lecturing you, [the essay] invites you into the pathways of the mind of a writer who’s examining, testing, and speculating. As Adorno said, the essay isn’t responsible for solving anything. And that suits an historical moment that’s filled with uncertainty and mistrust of dogmatism.”
“The hallmark of the personal essay is its intimacy. The writer seems to be speaking directly into your ear, confiding everything from gossip to wisdom. Through sharing thoughts, memories, desires, complaints, and whimsies, the personal essayist sets up a relationship with the reader, a dialogue—a friendship, if you will, based on identification, understanding, testiness, and companionship.”
First published nonfiction book:
Bachelorhood: Tales of the Metropolis, Little, Brown, 1981.
Select nonfiction bibliography (as editor):
The Golden Age of the American Essay, Anchor, 2021.
The Contemporary American Essay, Anchor, 2021.
The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present, Pantheon, 2020.
American Movie Critics, Library of America, 2006.
Writing New York, The Library of America, 1998.
The Art of the Personal Essay, Doubleday-Anchor, 1994.
Essays by Phillip Lopate reprinted (R) in The Best American Essays (BAE), or listed in Notables (N):
“An Archaeological Inquest,” The Threepenny Review, 2022 (BAE 2023, R).
Untitled (Table Talk), The Threepenny Review, 2020 (BAE 2021, N).
“Eros in the Classroom,” Upstreet, 2018 (BAE 2019, N).
“Red Relations,” Mount Hope, 2016 (BAE 2017, N).
“Experience Necessary,” Salmagundi, 2015 (BAE 2016, N).
“Early Memories of a Class Traitor,” Tin House, 2014 (BAE 2015, N).
“How I Look at Movies,” The Normal School, 2013 (BAE 2014, N).
“City Essay Films,” The Normal School, 2012 (BAE 2013, N).
“Between Insanity and Fat Dullness: How I Became an Emersonian,” Harper's Magazine, 2011 (BAE 2012, N).
“How Do You End an Essay?” Salmagundi, 2010 (BAE, 2011, N).
“Brooklyn the Unknowable,” Harvard Review, 2009 (BAE 2010, R).
“Tea at the Plaza,” Open City, 2005 (BAE 2006, N).
“The Countess's Tutor,” Doubletake, 2000 (BAE 2001, N).
“Strolling up Madison Avenue,” Culturefront,1997 (BAE 1998, N).
“The Invisible Woman,” The Threepenny Review, 1995 (BAE 1996, N).
“Detachment and Passion,” Southwest Review, 1994 (BAE 1995, N).
“One Man's Abortion,” American Literary Review, 1994 (BAE 1995, N).
“Portrait of My Body,” Michigan Quarterly Review, 1993 (BAE 1994, N).
“In Search of the Centaur: The Essay-Film,” The Threepenny Review, 1992 (BAE 1993, N).
“The Dead Father: A Remembrance of Donald Barthelme,” The Threepenny Review“, 1991 (BAE 1992, N).
“Misunderstood Men,” New York Woman, 1990 (BAE 1991, N).
“Suicide of a Schoolteacher,” Boulevard, 1989 (BAE 1990, N).
“Movie Mad at Columbia,” Columbia, 1988 (BAE 1989, N).
“Against Joie de Vivre,” Ploughshares, 1986 (BAE 1987, R).
See also:
Read an interview with Phillip Lopate in Columbia News about his 2024 book My Affair with Art House Cinema. Essays and Reviews (Columbia U Press, 2024).
Read a profile of Lopate, “The Dark Angel of Nonfiction,” by Susan Shapiro in Tablet, 2023.
Watch “Reading and Writing the Essay,” a two-hour class from Five Things I’ve Learned, 2022.
Watch “Phillip Lopate” in Great Writers, Great Readings, Hofstra University, 2016.
Watch “Narrating Place,” a keynote to New York University’s Narrative and Design Studies Symposium, held March 2014.
Read an interview with Phillip Lopate in Bomb, from 2013.