Belles Lettres, Criticism, Essays
- 2011 — Eric Bentley
- 2005 — Joan Didion
- 1999 — Harold Bloom
- 1993 — Elizabeth Hardwick
- 1987 — Jacques Barzun
- 1981 — Malcolm Cowley
- 1975 — Kenneth Burke
- 1965 — Walter Lippmann
- 1960 — E. B. White
- 1955 — Edmund Wilson
- 1950 — H. L. Mencken
- 1946 — Van Wyck Brooks
- 1935 — Agnes Repplier
- 1925 — William Crary Brownell
- 1916 — John Burroughs
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Famous quotes containing the words belles and/or essays:
“[T]here is a Wit for Discourse, and a Wit for Writing. The Easiness and Familiarity of the first, is not to savour in the least of Study; but the Exactness of the other, is to admit of something like the Freedom of Discourse, especially in Treatises of Humanity, and what regards the Belles Lettres.”
—Richard Steele (1672–1729)
“I have been reporting club meetings for four years and I am tired of hearing reviews of the books I was brought up on. I am tired of amateur performances at occasions announced to be for purposes either of enjoyment or improvement. I am tired of suffering under the pretense of acquiring culture. I am tired of hearing the word “culture” used so wantonly. I am tired of essays that let no guilty author escape quotation.”
—Josephine Woodward, U.S. author. As quoted in Everyone Was Brave, ch. 3, by William L. O’Neill (1969)