A short life of the author
Joseph Epstein (born 22 January 1937) is an American essayist, short story writer, and literary critic who has been described — not without justification — as the finest familiar essayist in the English language since Max Beerbohm. His essay collections, produced at a steady pace over more than four decades, display a combination of wit, erudition, psychological acuity, and stylistic elegance that places him in the tradition of Montaigne, Lamb, Hazlitt, and Beerbohm: writers for whom the essay is not a minor form but the most intimate and versatile genre available to a writer who wants to think in public about anything that interests him.
Life and Career
Epstein was born in Chicago and grew up in a Jewish middle-class family on the North Side. He attended the University of Chicago (where he was, by his own admission, a mediocre student more interested in poker and basketball than in the Great Books) and served in the Army. He worked briefly in publishing and then taught at Northwestern University for decades as a lecturer in English, without tenure — a position he accepted because it left him time to write.
From 1975 to 1997, he served as editor of The American Scholar, the quarterly journal of Phi Beta Kappa, which he transformed from a staid academic publication into one of the liveliest literary magazines in America. Under his editorship, The American Scholar published essays by writers including Joan Didion, Joseph Brodsky, and Cynthia Ozick, and Epstein’s own contributions — erudite, witty, and deliberately unfashionable — set the magazine’s tone.
The Essays
Epstein’s essays deal with subjects that range from friendship and snobbery to ambition, envy, and the experience of ageing — the permanent subjects of the familiar essay tradition. His method is to take a large, abstract subject (gossip, charm, the desire for fame) and explore it through a combination of personal anecdote, literary reference, sociological observation, and moral reflection, producing essays that are simultaneously entertaining and genuinely illuminating.
His prose style is his most distinctive quality: relaxed, conversational, syntactically various, and capable of moving from a joke to a serious observation in a single sentence. He writes as if he were talking to an intelligent friend over dinner — the friend who reads widely, thinks independently, and appreciates a well-turned sentence. This apparent ease is, of course, the product of enormous craft.
Representative collections include Familiar Territory: Observations on American Life (1979), Plausible Prejudices: Essays on American Writing (1985), A Line Out for a Walk: Familiar Essays (1991), With My Trousers Rolled: Familiar Essays (1995), Snobbery: The American Version (2002), and Envy: The Seven Deadly Sins (2003).
The Short Stories
Epstein’s short fiction — collected in The Goldin Boys (1991), Fabulous Small Jews (2003), and The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff (2010) — draws on the world of Jewish Chicago: the men of his father’s generation, the delicatessens and country clubs, the anxieties about money and status and assimilation. The stories are in the tradition of Malamud and Bellow — observant, compassionate, and informed by a deep understanding of the particular comedy of American Jewish life.
Literary Criticism
Epstein’s critical essays — on writers from Henry James to Tom Wolfe — are models of the journalistic critical tradition: informed, opinionated, and written for a general audience rather than an academic one. Plausible Prejudices is a particularly strong collection that includes essays on contemporary American fiction that are sharp, funny, and sometimes devastating.
His book-length studies include Ambition: The Secret Passion (1980), Snobbery: The American Version (2002), Friendship: An Exposé (2006), and brief biographies of Alexis de Tocqueville (2006) and Fred Astaire (2008).
Critical Standing
Epstein is a writer’s writer — deeply admired by other essayists and by readers who value prose style, but not widely known outside literary circles. His political conservatism has limited his academic reputation, and the familiar essay itself is a marginal genre in an era dominated by novels and memoir. But the quality of his prose is undeniable, and his best essays will last.
Collecting Epstein
Epstein’s books, published by small and medium-sized presses, are generally available at moderate prices. Familiar Territory (1979, Oxford University Press) in first edition brings $15–$40. Fabulous Small Jews (2003, Houghton Mifflin) brings $10–$25. Signed copies are available through his public appearances.