Her list collects famous writers, but of works that often fall between the cracks. Ms. Bloom has identified the canon of essays that live on in an American culture where the essay has fallen out of favor or changed beyond recognition. In her research, she has studied the anthologies and textbooks that are widely used in freshman composition courses.
People talk about certain essays as canonical.
There are critical canons in other genres, seeking to encapsulate the best that has been written. She's not much interested in making such judgments. For students outside the humanities, their only exposure to literary writing might be reading E.B. White, Joan Didion, or Martin Luther King, Jr., in freshman comp. Yet the status of the essay remains vexed. It's a question that came up last week at the annual meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, where Ms. Bloom along with other scholars and Robert Atwan, a leading anthologist, described the challenges of defining, editing, and teaching the essay.