The Ten Most Forgotten Essays in the English Literary Tradition (1893–1928)
Ten essays that were read seriously in their moment and are gone from every anthology that currently teaches the form.
Written & prepared by Longhand Almanac Research · 8 September 2026
The Brief
Ten essays written in English between 1893 and 1928 that received documented serious attention at publication (named reviewers, peers’ praise, documented reprint runs) and are excluded from every anthology that currently teaches the form. Each entry documents the reception, names the mechanism of the forgetting, and links to where the essay can be read today. Nine of the ten are free at open archives; the tenth sits in HathiTrust page images where US access permits.
Forgetting, in the essay, works differently than forgetting in fiction. A novel has a spine, a binding, a physical object on a shelf that can be discovered by a browser two generations late. The essay’s natural habitat is the periodical: the monthly, the quarterly, the weekly review. And the periodical’s natural end is the recycling bin. When an essay does survive into book form, it survives as one entry among forty, and the first time the author’s “Collected” volume lapses from the publisher’s backlist, forty essays disappear in a single editorial decision. Three peculiar vulnerabilities compound this fragility: the periodical-to-volume bottleneck (most essays never make the jump), the thematic-obsolescence risk (arguments bound to a specific political moment age in months, not decades), and the pattern by which fiction overshadows essay (when a serious novelist or poet also writes essays, the essays are almost always cleared from the shelf once the fiction is canonized).
This collection presents ten essays written in English between 1893 and 1928, each of which received documented serious attention at publication and each of which has since been excluded from every anthology that currently teaches the form. The essays come from four national traditions. Three are by Black American intellectuals whose periodical work never received a bound volume of its own. Obscurity is the condition of most writing; what these ten share is a specific, traceable mechanism of disappearance. The project of recovery begins by naming the mechanism. Longhand Almanac is a search and discovery engine for creative writing published on sites people built themselves, and the essay’s pre-web history is the clearest warning in this series: the form most at home in periodicals is the form that dies with them.
Methodology
Each case passes a four-criteria test. First, the essay received documented contemporary attention at a specific date: a named reviewer, a peer’s letter, inclusion in a contemporary assessment, citation in a major periodical. Second, the essay is currently absent from a defined set of anthologies consulted for the most recent editions (2015–2026): the Norton Anthology of English Literature (10th ed.); the Norton Anthology of American Literature (10th ed., 2022); the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (Gates and Smith, 3rd ed., 2014); the Library of America’s relevant volumes; the Heath Anthology of American Literature; John Gross’s Oxford Book of Essays (1991); Phillip Lopate’s Art of the Personal Essay (1994); the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing; and Imre Salusinszky’s Oxford Book of Australian Essays (1997). Third, the essay has a documentable mechanism of forgetting: not mere obscurity, but a specifiable cause, whether magazine-specific erasure, Collected Works liquidation, fiction overshadowing essay, premature death without literary estate, political repudiation, venue contamination, or the anthology bottleneck in which one essay is canonized and the rest discarded. Fourth, the essay is accessible: a working URL is provided for each, and every URL was re-checked in September 2026.
Several initially strong candidates were dropped during verification. George Schuyler’s “The Negro-Art Hokum” (Nation, 1926), Marita Bonner’s “On Being Young, a Woman, and Colored” (Crisis, 1925), and William Stanley Braithwaite’s “The Negro in American Literature” (Crisis, 1924, substantially revised in Locke’s New Negro, 1925) all appear in Gates and Smith’s Norton Anthology of African American Literature and fail the absence test. Marcus Clarke’s famous preface to Adam Lindsay Gordon’s poems, A. G. Stephens’s “A Word for Australians,” and Christopher Brennan’s “University and Australian Literature” are all in Salusinszky. Vernon Lee’s essays have had enough recent Penguin attention to complicate a pure absence claim; she is noted as a borderline case. Each drop is recorded in the Researcher’s Note.
The aim is narrow. The essay does not need a secondary canon; the point is to show that the form’s most serious losses are specific, and that most of them are retrievable with a link.
At publication. Meynell’s title essay appeared first in W. E. Henley’s National Observer before Mathews and Lane collected it in 1893. Coventry Patmore, reviewing her in the Fortnightly Review in 1892 and reprinting the piece the following year in Religio Poetae, called fully half the volume “classical work, embodying as it does new thought in perfect language, and bearing in every sentence the hallmark of genius.” George Meredith corresponded with her through the 1890s and named a variety of iris for her; his letters to her were published by Nonesuch in 1923. G. K. Chesterton, a generation later, treated Meynell as one of the indispensable late-Victorian prose stylists.
The forgetting. The mechanism is double. Meynell’s lyric poetry was anthologized briefly in the mid-twentieth century (“Renouncement,” “A Father of Women”), and the anthologists treated this as sufficient representation. Gross’s 1991 Oxford Book of Essays selected her slighter “Under the Early Stars,” which had the effect of occupying the Meynell slot without admitting the more ambitious prose. After Burns Oates let its mid-century selection lapse, no major press reissued her essays until Carcanet in 2021. Her Catholic devotional register placed her outside mid-century secular criticism’s interests, and her gender placed her outside the Chesterton-Belloc genealogy that organized Edwardian essay memory.
Why it still matters. “The Rhythm of Life” argues that emotional experience is metrical: that happiness and grief return on orbits whose period cannot be measured but whose recurrence is certain. Read now, it is closer to Kathryn Schulz’s phenomenology of loss in Lost & Found than to anything else in late-Victorian periodical prose. Meynell’s compressed, aphoristic method, refusing narrative scaffolding and thinking in short paragraphs that behave like stanzas, is the ancestor form that readers of Olivia Laing or Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost already know without knowing its origin. The standard Pater-to-Woolf genealogy of the English essay skips the female fin-de-siècle stylist who tutored Woolf’s generation.
Sources. Patmore’s review-essay appears in Religio Poetae (George Bell & Sons, 1893); scanned at https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.53256. Meredith’s correspondence: Letters from George Meredith to Alice Meynell 1896–1907 (Nonesuch, 1923). Biographical context: June Badeni, The Slender Tree: A Life of Alice Meynell (Tabb House, 1981); Ana Parejo Vadillo’s chapter on Meynell in Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism (Palgrave, 2005). Carcanet’s 2021 reissue, edited by Ange Mlinko, supplies a modern introduction.
2. “The Passing of the Essay” by Agnes Repplier (1894)
At publication.In the Dozy Hours, and Other Papers collected Repplier’s Atlantic Monthly essays for Houghton Mifflin in 1894. She was then the Atlantic’s principal essayist; Bliss Perry, who edited the magazine for most of the decade after, treated her as the house’s Montaigne. The Atlantic’s February 1894 notice reviewed the volume as the center of gravity of American familiar prose. Repplier went on to receive honorary degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, Columbia, and Marquette, along with Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded her its Gold Medal in 1935.
The forgetting. Repplier wrote eighteen essay collections. None is currently in print from a trade publisher. Houghton Mifflin never reissued her after her death in 1950, and the Collected Works liquidation was total. The deeper cause is venue contamination and political obsolescence working together: Repplier was a Philadelphia Catholic conservative who opposed suffrage, and by the 1940s neither the New Critical academy nor, later, the feminist recovery projects of the 1970s had a shelf that could hold her. The record is partial, but no major university press has produced a selected edition. She is absent from the current Norton Anthology of American Literature, the Heath Anthology, the Library of America, Gross, and Lopate.
Why it still matters. “The Passing of the Essay” is an 1894 essay that worries the form is dying: a meta-text that reads, now, as the American counterpart to what Lopate does editorially and what Leslie Jamison does thematically in The Empathy Exams. Repplier’s dry observational register, her comic paragraphs about Chautauqua audiences “wriggling on straight and narrow chairs,” is a direct ancestor of Joan Didion’s flat-sentence irony and Jia Tolentino’s wellness satire in Trick Mirror. Her absence from the canon is the clearest American case of a woman essayist written out by anthologists who preferred novelists, the very gap Hilton Als’s White Girls fills without naming its predecessor.
Sources. The Atlantic notice, February 1894, is reproduced in the Encyclopedia of the Essay bibliographic entry on Repplier (Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997). Emma Repplier, Agnes Repplier: A Memoir (Dorrance, 1957), is the primary biographical source. George Stewart Stokes, Agnes Repplier: Lady of Letters (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1949), remains the most substantial critical treatment.
3. “As to The Leopard’s Spots: An Open Letter to Thomas Dixon, Jr.” by Kelly Miller (1905)
Mechanism: political repudiation · anthology bottleneck
At publication. Miller, dean at Howard and one of the most widely read Black intellectuals of the early twentieth century, wrote the open letter in response to Thomas Dixon’s Saturday Evening Post essay of August 19, 1905. The pamphlet went into a documented “Second ten thousand” printing within months, an unusual circulation for a Black-authored political essay in 1905. Miller was then a contributing editor of The Voice of the Negro, whose 1905 editorial roster listed him with Du Bois, Mary Church Terrell, and Benjamin Brawley. The Dixon-Miller exchange was the central Black-press controversy of that autumn, anticipating the argument Miller would extend through Race Adjustment (1908) and Out of the House of Bondage (1914).
The forgetting. The mechanism is pamphlet-form erasure compounded by political repudiation from both directions. Miller occupied the conciliationist middle between Booker T. Washington and Du Bois; when Du Boisian protest hardened into the posture of the Niagara Movement and the NAACP, Miller’s Howard-sociology voice was sidelined by the canonizers of the following generation. He does not appear anywhere in Gates and Smith’s Norton Anthology of African American Literature (3rd ed., 2014): not in the “Reconstruction to the New Negro Renaissance” section, not in Volume 2. The pamphlet as a form was never absorbed by the anthology pipeline that preferred Crisis, Opportunity, and New Negro provenance. A signed contemporary review in the New York Age or Washington Bee would strengthen the case further; those archives are paywalled, and this account relies on the documented reprint run and the Voice of the Negro context for contemporary notice.
Why it still matters. The essay is the urtext of the open letter to a white antagonist. Miller’s opening sentence (“I am writing you this letter to express the attitude and feeling of ten million of your fellow citizens toward the evil propagandism of race animosity to which you have lent your great literary powers”) is the form Ta-Nehisi Coates revived in Between the World and Me and “The Case for Reparations,” and that Hilton Als practices in his epistolary criticism. Miller’s surgical dismantling of Dixon’s pseudo-Darwinian race science prefigures Saidiya Hartman’s counter-archival method and Tressie McMillan Cottom’s anatomy of anti-Black social science in Thick. Recovering the pamphlet places the Howard sociological tradition, and not only literary Harlem, at the origin of modern Black essay practice.
Sources. The 1905 Hayworth pamphlet collation appears in Heritage Auctions lot records documenting the “Second ten thousand” issue. Miller’s full bibliography is catalogued in the Kelly Miller Papers at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. Biographical context: August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915 (Univ. of Michigan Press, 1963), and Dickson Bruce Jr., Black American Writing from the Nadir (LSU Press, 1989). Voice of the Negro editorial context: Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color (Indiana Univ. Press, 1990).
4. “On Knowing London” by Richard Middleton (1913)
At publication. The Spectator’s “Some Books of the Week” notice for 18 October 1913 reviewed Monologues at length. The reviewer hedged about the value of republishing “work which is for the most part of an obviously ephemeral nature” but singled out the essay under review: “Middleton’s admirers will find much in these essays that is not unworthy of the author of ‘The Ghost Ship.’ There is some delightful writing, for instance, in the paper ‘On Knowing London.’” Henry Savage, Middleton’s friend and executor, had already edited The Ghost Ship and Other Stories (1912) with a preface by Arthur Machen, whose line “I would not exchange this short, crazy, enchanting fantasy for a whole wilderness of seemly novels” became the most-quoted sentence in Middleton’s posthumous reception. Savage’s Richard Middleton: The Man and His Work (Cecil Palmer, 1922) then became the standard biographical source. Frank Harris included Middleton in Contemporary Portraits (1915).
The forgetting. Middleton took his own life in a Brussels boarding-house in December 1911, aged twenty-nine. The absence of a literary estate is the primary mechanism; Savage had copyright but no institutional platform, and when Fisher Unwin’s stock was absorbed by Ernest Benn in 1926, Monologues was never reprinted. Every subsequent Middleton revival (Wordsworth, Tartarus, various ghost-story anthologies) has selected only the weird fiction, never the essays. Middleton thus shows a textbook anthology bottleneck: one story, “The Ghost Ship,” became his permanent identity, and the essays that had built his reputation in periodicals like Vanity Fair and The Academy stayed dispersed in magazines that no longer have readers.
Why it still matters. “On Knowing London” proposes that a city is known through a few ecstatic accidents rather than continuous topography: an escaped monkey on Burns’s statue, a drunk boy singing in a café. The claim prefigures Iain Sinclair’s psychogeography and Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City by eighty years. Middleton’s Edwardian metropolitan melancholy, comic at its own expense, is the register Geoff Dyer has made his own in Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. Recovering him redraws the period map: Edwardian essay has been Chesterton-and-Belloc territory for a century, and Middleton offers the bohemian, gay-coded metropolitan counter-tradition that anticipates modernism.
Sources.Spectator archive, 18 October 1913, p. 25, at https://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/18th-october-1913/25/some-books-of-the-week. Henry Savage, Richard Middleton: The Man and His Work (Cecil Palmer, 1922). Arthur Machen, preface to The Ghost Ship and Other Stories (Fisher Unwin, 1912). Frank Harris, Contemporary Portraits (Mitchell Kennerley, 1915).
At publication. “How I Began” ran as Thomas’s contribution to T.P.’s Weekly’s literary-autobiography series in 1913, when he was still principally known as a prose writer and reviewer with two thousand pages of published criticism, topography, and nature writing. Thomas Seccombe’s foreword to The Last Sheaf (Jonathan Cape, 1928) reintroduced the essay fifteen years later and functioned, coming from a TLS and Bookman reviewer of authority, as the official endorsement of Thomas’s prose for readers who had since learned him only as a war poet. Walter de la Mare’s 1920 foreword to the Collected Poems remarks on the prose craft (“there is nothing precious, elaborate, brilliant, esoteric, obscure in his work”), the sentence that registered Thomas as a stylist before he was a lyric poet.
The forgetting. Thomas’s death at Arras on 9 April 1917 is the origin of his canonicity. The Poems of 1917 and the Collected Poems of 1920, both mediated by Robert Frost’s endorsement and by the need of postwar readers for a war poet who was also a pastoral poet, created the “Edward Thomas” that entered school anthologies. The prose was everything he had done before the war, and Thomas had called himself a “hurried and harried prose man” often enough that critics took him at his word. The Last Sheaf had no trade reissue after 1928 until the 2010s. The Norton Anthology of English Literature continues to represent Thomas only by three poems (“Adlestrop,” “Rain,” “As the team’s head-brass”); “How I Began” is in none of the anthologies consulted.
Why it still matters. “How I Began” is a spare autobiography of vocation, how a London boy taught himself to write by copying Richard Jefferies, and it reads as the direct ancestor of Brian Dillon’s Essayism and Affinities, both explicitly about how one finds a form. Thomas’s understated, diary-adjacent prose, braiding landscape with self-examination, is the template Robert Macfarlane has followed in The Old Ways and Underland; Macfarlane has written introductions to Thomas’s prose precisely because the lineage is unbroken. Recovering the essay restores the missing link between Victorian periodical autobiography and the twenty-first-century vocational essay.
Sources. Thomas Seccombe, foreword to The Last Sheaf (Cape, 1928). R. George Thomas, Edward Thomas: A Portrait (Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), the standard biography. Matthew Hollis, Now All Roads Lead to France (Faber, 2011), on the wartime transition. Edna Longley, ed., The Annotated Collected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2008), for the prose-poetry relationship.
6. “People of Color in Louisiana” by Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1916–17)
At publication. The essay appeared in the second volume of Carter G. Woodson’s newly founded Journal of Negro History, then the principal scholarly venue for Black historical work in English, and was quickly taken up as the foundational anglophone study of Louisiana’s gens de couleur libres. Charles B. Roussève cited both parts in The Negro in Louisiana (Xavier Univ. Press, 1937). Within Dunbar-Nelson’s lifetime, Who’s Who in Colored Louisiana (1930) listed the essay as her principal scholarly work. The subsequent citation trail is continuous; dissertations on Louisiana’s free-people-of-color history through the early 2020s still treat it as originary.
The forgetting. The mechanism is fiction-and-poetry overshadowing combined with disciplinary silo. Gates and Smith’s Norton Anthology of African American Literature, third edition, represents Dunbar-Nelson by three poems (“Violets,” “I Sit and Sew,” “April Is on the Way”) and by none of her essays. Anthologists inherited the early-twentieth-century reading of her as a minor lyricist and widow of Paul Laurence Dunbar, and her substantial essay corpus in the Southern Workman, the Messenger, the Journal of Negro History, and her Pittsburgh Courier column “From a Woman’s Point of View” was divided among the disciplines of history, journalism studies, and archival feminism, none of which fed the literary canon. Gloria Hull’s Give Us Each Day (1984) recovered the diaries; the essays were left.
Why it still matters. A Creole woman intellectual writing a forty-page archival history of Louisiana’s mixed-race population in 1916 anticipates, with methodological precision, the moves Saidiya Hartman makes in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: fugitive lives, Black women in and around the archive, the estranging of historical narrative. Margo Jefferson’s Negroland depends on the lineage of Black women treating their own social caste as ethnographic object, a tradition Dunbar-Nelson helped create. Recovering the essay corrects a canon that allows Du Bois alone to represent Black scholarly essayism in the years 1900–1920, and it models the braiding of sociology and memoir that Tressie McMillan Cottom and Imani Perry practice now.
Sources.Journal of Negro History (Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1916 and 1917 issues). Gloria T. Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (Indiana Univ. Press, 1987). Katherine Adams, “‘A Study in Social Conditions’: Alice Dunbar-Nelson and the Public-Sphere Politics of Recovery,” Legacy 33:2 (2016). Tara T. Green, Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (Bloomsbury, 2022).
7. “The Twilight of Idols” by Randolph Bourne (1917)
At publication. The essay ran in The Seven Arts, Vol. 2, No. 6 (October 1917), pp. 688–702, in the number that closed the magazine. The magazine’s patron, Annette Rankine, had withdrawn her subsidy under family pressure over its antiwar position, and the autumn 1917 issue was its last. John Dewey replied to the broader Bourne series in the New Republic of 17 September 1917 (“Conscription of Thought”). James Oppenheim, Bourne’s editor at Seven Arts, wrote in the 1919 foreword to Untimely Papers that Bourne “effectually destroys” liberal pragmatism in “Twilight of Idols” and called the collection “the most effective and terrible indictment of the institution of the State which the war has yet brought forth.” The same foreword described Bourne as “the very type of that proletarian-aristocrat which is coming into being.”
The forgetting. Triple erasure: magazine-specific, political, biographical. The Seven Arts suspended publication in the autumn of 1917. Bourne’s stance ended his career at the New Republic and the Atlantic; his biographer Bruce Clayton later described “Twilight of Idols” as “intellectual suicide” (Forgotten Prophet, LSU Press, 1984). Bourne died of influenza on 22 December 1918, age thirty-two, before any rehabilitation was possible. Bourne has since had specialist editors (Olaf Hansen’s The Radical Will, Urizen, 1977, is the standard), but the Norton Anthology of American Literature, when it includes him at all, prefers “Trans-National America” (Atlantic, July 1916), leaving “Twilight of Idols” outside mainstream anthology reach. The Library of America has no Bourne volume.
Why it still matters. “Twilight of Idols” invents the American adversarial-intellectual voice: the stance of the dissenter watching liberal institutions accommodate themselves to catastrophe, the stance Joan Didion would later inhabit in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and that Hilton Als performs toward cultural institutions in White Girls. Bourne’s core line, that pragmatism had become “a philosophy upon which I had relied to carry us through that no longer works,” is the structural template of the essay of disillusionment Leslie Jamison deploys in The Empathy Exams whenever a liberal framework buckles under moral weight. Jia Tolentino’s “The I in the Internet” makes Bourne’s move: locate a generational faith, diagnose its self-betrayal from the inside.
Sources.The Seven Arts, Vol. 2, No. 6 (October 1917). Dewey’s reply: New Republic 12:148 (17 September 1917), pp. 128–130. Oppenheim’s foreword to Untimely Papers (Huebsch, 1919). Bruce Clayton, Forgotten Prophet: The Life of Randolph Bourne (LSU Press, 1984). Leslie J. Vaughan, Randolph Bourne and the Politics of Cultural Radicalism (Univ. Press of Kansas, 1997).
8. “Problems of a Writer’s Life” by Rose Macaulay (1925)
At publication.A Casual Commentary collected thirty-nine essays, most first printed in Time and Tide, the Daily News, Good Housekeeping, and Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine between 1922 and 1925. Virginia Woolf read Macaulay directly; her diary for 1925–26 complains, in a remark Benjamin Schwarz and James Campbell quote in their New Criterion essay “The Worldly and Unworldly Fortunes of Rose Macaulay,” “Why should she take the field so unnecessarily?” Woolf’s irritation is the register of a close contemporary reader, and the following year the Hogarth Press itself published Macaulay’s next essay volume, Catchwords and Claptrap (1926). Methuen’s prospectus, Jane Emery records in Rose Macaulay: A Writer’s Life (John Murray, 1991), had aimed the book at “highbrow readers.”
The forgetting. The mechanism is fiction overshadow compounded by literal destruction of archive. The Towers of Trebizond (1956) absorbed nearly all critical attention after Macaulay’s death in 1958, and her World War II novel The World My Wilderness (1950) the rest. Her Luxborough House flat was destroyed in the Blitz in May 1941, taking her library, papers, and work in progress: a literal erasure of archive that made it far harder to produce, later, the Collected Essays that might have sustained her essayistic reputation. By the early 1930s, Emery records, Macaulay herself worried that the Commentary essays had been “too popular” to be taken seriously, and she retreated into biography and novel-criticism. A Casual Commentary has had no proper trade reissue since 1925. The Norton represents her only by a Towers of Trebizond entry; Gross selected only “Evening Parties.”
Why it still matters. “Problems of a Writer’s Life” does for the interwar professional woman writer what Rebecca Solnit does for the twenty-first-century public intellectual: it treats the economic and epistemic precarity of essay-writing itself as the essay’s subject. Macaulay’s comic-detached register, what the Washington Post has elsewhere called “a Martian visitor with a flawless command of English,” prefigures the cool analytic warmth of Zadie Smith’s Feel Free and Kathryn Schulz’s New Yorker essays. The standard history of the 1920s British essay stops at Woolf and Strachey; Macaulay is the popular, professional, proto-feminist alternative whose erasure was overdetermined by Blitz, gender, and genre.
Sources. Jane Emery, Rose Macaulay: A Writer’s Life (John Murray, 1991). Sarah LeFanu, Rose Macaulay (Virago, 2003). The Woolf diary entry: The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Hogarth, 1980), quoted via Schwarz and Campbell, “The Worldly and Unworldly Fortunes of Rose Macaulay,” The New Criterion (2003), at https://newcriterion.com/article/the-worldly-unworldly-fortunes-of-rose-macaulay/.
9. “Who Is the New Negro, and Why?” by J. A. Rogers (1927)
Mechanism: anthology bottleneck
Where to read it. The Marxists Internet Archive hosts The Messenger’s essentially complete run, by year, at https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/messenger/index.htm; the essay appears in Vol. 9, No. 3 (March 1927), pp. 68 ff. It is also reprinted in J. A. Rogers: Selected Writings, ed. Louis J. Parascandola (University of Tennessee Press; open access on JSTOR at https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.9669490).
At publication. George Schuyler, then literary editor of the Messenger (1926–28), solicited the essay as part of the magazine’s late-1920s rebranding under the masthead “The New Opinion of the New Negro.” Rogers reached porters, domestic workers, and a national Pittsburgh Courier readership through his weekly columns, and has been called the most widely read Black historian of his generation, a formulation his modern editors repeat. W. E. B. Du Bois is widely quoted endorsing him (“No man living has revealed so many important facts about the Negro race as has Rogers”). Arturo Schomburg recommended his work to Carter G. Woodson.
The forgetting. Magazine-specific erasure compounded by disciplinary repudiation. The Messenger folded in 1928 when A. Philip Randolph diverted its resources to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and its run was not anthologized at book scale for generations. Rogers’s autodidact, race-vindicationist mode, visible in 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro, Sex and Race, and his Courier columns, was dismissed by mid-century academic historians as popular rather than scholarly, exiling him from both the literary and the historical canons even as his books sold in the hundreds of thousands through Black bookstores. Rogers’s one essay that has been anthologized, “Jazz at Home” in Locke’s New Negro (1925), satisfies the token-Rogers slot and leaves the Messenger essays out. He is absent from Gates and Smith’s Norton Anthology of African American Literature (3rd ed., 2014); the Harlem Renaissance section moves from Locke through Hurston and Thurman without him.
Why it still matters. “Who Is the New Negro, and Why?” is the working journalist’s version of Locke’s thesis: a street-level Pan-African counter to the boutique Harlem Renaissance, aimed at porters and Courier subscribers rather than Knopf subscribers, and the obvious progenitor of the early-career journalism Ta-Nehisi Coates was writing at the Atlantic before Between the World and Me. Rogers’s choice of audience, the Black popular reader as the rightful audience for serious intellectual prose, prefigures the method Tressie McMillan Cottom uses in Thick. Restoring him would correct the Norton’s near-total reliance on the Locke-Du Bois axis for 1920s Black thought.
Sources.The Messenger, Vol. 9, No. 3 (March 1927). J. A. Rogers: Selected Writings, ed. Louis J. Parascandola (University of Tennessee Press; JSTOR jj.9669490). Theodore Kornweibel Jr., No Crystal Stair: Black Life and the Messenger, 1917–1928 (Greenwood, 1975). Thabiti Asukile’s scholarship on Rogers’s journalism.
10. “The Canadian Short Story” by Raymond Knister (1928)
Mechanism: premature death without estate · metropolitan gatekeeping
At publication. Knister’s introduction to Canadian Short Stories (Macmillan of Canada, 1928) was a pioneer statement of Canadian literary modernism. He had served as associate editor of The Midland in Iowa City in 1923, John T. Frederick’s Midwestern little magazine that also published Hart Crane, and returned to Ontario with a modernist theory of indigenous realism. The anthology’s dust-jacket text, preserved in book-trade collations of a 1928 copy, calls it “the realization of Raymond Knister’s long-cherished dream” and notes that his selection rescued fiction that “had no permanent form; others have been printed in books which are now unavailable.” The table of contents includes Morley Callaghan, Stephen Leacock, Duncan Campbell Scott, Charles G. D. Roberts, and Mazo de la Roche. The Canadian Forum treated the book as a landmark; Leo Kennedy’s obituary-essay on Knister in Canadian Forum 12 (1931) opens by citing the introduction as the best contemporary account of the genre’s possibilities.
The forgetting. Knister drowned in Lake St. Clair on 29 August 1932, aged thirty-three, in circumstances that Dorothy Livesay, his editor, friend, and later the custodian of his posthumous Collected Poems (1949), treated as possible suicide. No estate of institutional weight survived him; his archive was dispersed between McMaster and Victoria College over decades. Macmillan of Canada’s 1928 anthology went out of print and was only reissued in 1971 by Books for Libraries Press as a photomechanical reprint. The essay’s mechanism is compound: premature death without estate, small-nation anthology weakness (Canada’s canon-forming anthologies consolidated much later and without him), and fiction overshadowing essay (Knister’s reputation, such as it was recovered in the 1970s and 1980s, rested on his short stories, never on the critical introduction that argued for them).
Why it still matters. Knister’s introduction is the closest Canadian analogue to the American modernist manifestos that Bourne, Brooks, and Rosenfeld were writing in Seven Arts a decade earlier: a small-country counterpart to the cultural-nationalist essay that made American modernism possible. His claim that “some of the most interesting prose written by Canadians” had been lost to magazines and out-of-print books is, among other things, a statement of the problem this collection addresses. Readers of Alice Munro’s occasional essays, of Anne Michaels’s criticism, or of Rohinton Mistry’s reviews, anyone who assumes a Canadian critical prose exists continuously, are reading the tradition Knister tried, and failed in his lifetime, to establish.
Sources. Raymond Knister, ed., Canadian Short Stories (Macmillan of Canada, 1928; Books for Libraries Press, 1971). Dorothy Livesay, memoir in Collected Poems of Raymond Knister (Ryerson, 1949). Anne Burke, ed., Raymond Knister: An Annotated Bibliography (ECW Press, 1981). Gregory Betts, ed., After Exile: A Raymond Knister Poetry Reader (Exile Editions, 2003). Leo Kennedy, “Raymond Knister,” Canadian Forum 12 (1931).
Patterns of Forgetting
Throughout our research, the Longhand Almanac team discovered five recurring patterns when it came to forgetting essays, and a sixth at the edges.
The first, and the most specific to the essay, is the periodical-to-volume bottleneck (a form-specific cousin of venue_collapse). Middleton’s Monologues, Thomas’s Last Sheaf, Macaulay’s A Casual Commentary, Repplier’s In the Dozy Hours, Bourne’s Untimely Papers, and Knister’s introduction were all essays born in magazines; their book form came once, and when the book stopped being reprinted, the essays returned to the magazine’s grave. Meynell and Rogers wrote for venues, the National Observer and the Messenger, that had only a limited backlist life. The periodical, in the essay’s native ecology, is an incubator whose hatchlings die in large numbers. The bottleneck is a specific structural fact, and obscurity is only its result.
The second is magazine-specific erasure (venue_collapse). When a magazine closes, its unanthologized essays close with it. The Seven Arts (founded 1916, closed autumn 1917) took Bourne’s most radical work with it into obscurity even after Huebsch gathered Untimely Papers. The Messenger (closed 1928) took Rogers’s columns. The Dial (closed 1929) took Paul Rosenfeld’s criticism. T.P.’s Weekly and the National Observer took essays by Thomas and Meynell that might otherwise have had second circulations. The ideological essay magazine, especially one that depends on a single patron or editor, is structurally suicidal; when it dies it takes the writing with it.
The third is Collected Works liquidation (a backlist-scale extension of the shared taxonomy). Repplier’s eighteen volumes with Houghton Mifflin, Chapman’s twelve scattered volumes, Macaulay’s Methuen backlist, and Meynell’s Burns Oates selection all went out of print within a generation of the author’s death and were not reacquired. The essay’s book life depends on backlist cultivation, and the 1950s through 1970s were an era of backlist abandonment for single-author essay collections in both Britain and the United States. Jacques Barzun’s 1957 Chapman, Olaf Hansen’s 1977 Bourne, and Phillip Lopate’s 1994 Art of the Personal Essay, the three major recovery projects of the postwar period, succeeded only for the handful of writers each could hold; the rest remain on HathiTrust.
The fourth, documented in four of these cases, is fiction or poetry overshadowing essay (the oeuvre-level form of one_story_tax). Thomas’s poetry eclipsed his prose the moment he died at Arras; Meynell’s lyrics and her devotional reputation outlived her essays; Macaulay’s Towers of Trebizond swallowed the Commentary volumes; Dunbar-Nelson’s poems displaced her historical essays in every twentieth-century anthology. The mechanism is not neutral: anthologists choose the form in which an author can be taught in a single class session, and the short poem or the short story wins against the 4,000-word argument.
The fifth, specific to Black American essayists in this period, is the anthology bottleneck within a constrained canon (anthology_bottleneck). Locke’s New Negro (1925) and its inheritors, including Gates and Smith’s Norton, had limited space to represent twenty years of Black periodical thought, and their choices became self-reinforcing. Schuyler entered on “The Negro-Art Hokum”; Braithwaite entered via a Locke-mediated essay; Bonner entered on “On Being Young, a Woman, and Colored.” The slot having been filled, the rest of each author’s essayistic output became invisible. The pamphlets (Miller), the scholarly journal essays (Dunbar-Nelson), and the mass-circulation Black-press columns (Rogers) were exactly the forms the Locke-Norton pipeline was least equipped to absorb, and they disappeared accordingly.
A sixth, appearing here only glancingly but worth naming, is political repudiation compounded by premature death (political_repudiation + premature_death_without_estate). Bourne and Knister both died before they could rebuild from public controversy. Middleton died before he had any institutional support at all. In each case the absence of a living author to defend the work, to write letters, choose an executor, and negotiate with publishers, was decisive. The essay needs a living author in a way the novel does not; its backlist life is shorter, its publisher’s commitment thinner, and its survival more dependent on the author’s own continuing advocacy.
The Mechanism Vocabulary
Each entry above carries its tags from the almanac’s working vocabulary of thirteen mechanisms of forgetting. The nine at work in this list:
anthology bottleneck anthology_bottleneck
One selection comes to stand in for an author, and later editors copy it; the rest of the corpus stops being reprinted.
anthology petrifaction anthology_petrifaction
Anthology slots assigned decades ago freeze in place across reissues, and the table of contents outlives the judgment behind it.
double forgetting double_forgetting
Criticism survives only as long as the writers it championed; when both vanish together, the criticism loses its exhibits.
political repudiation political_repudiation
Blacklist, denunciation, or a disqualifying association; editors drop the name, and the next generation never reads it.
premature death without estate premature_death_without_estate
The writer dies young, and no widow, executor, or academic carries the archive into the next generation.
venue contamination venue_contamination
The venue’s name becomes baggage, and the work it published stops being surveyed by the fields that would have kept it.
venue collapse venue_collapse
The magazine or platform dies and takes its contents out of circulation with it.
one-story tax one_story_tax
The canon grants an author one representative work and discards the rest of the shelf.
metropolitan gatekeeping metropolitan_gatekeeping
London and New York act as a narrow filter, admitting one or two writers per tradition; the rest wait outside the pipe.
Two further patterns named above, the periodical-to-volume bottleneck and Collected Works liquidation, are essay-specific extensions of the vocabulary rather than entry tags.
The Case for Active Recovery
The essay is the most vulnerable literary form. A poem can survive in an anthology of two stanzas; a novel can survive out of print, rediscovered by one reader at a yard sale. An essay needs a venue that remembers it, a volume that collects it, an editor who selects it, and a reader who can find it. When any one of those links breaks, the essay vanishes in a way that other forms do not. Every case here was known at publication, often noticed by the critics who mattered, and every one is gone from the anthologies that have taught the form for thirty years.
What the collection argues, taken together, is that the English-language essay between 1890 and 1930 was richer, more diverse, and more structurally fragile than the surviving canon indicates. The Pater-Woolf-Orwell-Baldwin lineage that organizes the current teaching of the form passes through real work but omits the women (Meynell, Repplier, Macaulay, Dunbar-Nelson), the Black periodical intellectuals outside the Locke axis (Miller, Rogers), the small-country modernists (Knister), and the early-dying radicals (Middleton, Bourne, and Thomas’s prose self). Each of these writers was at the center of the conversation in their moment. Each is available online now, free, with a URL. The gap between availability and presence in teaching, the gap between the link and the syllabus, is the specific problem of essay canonicity in the twenty-first century.
What recovery would look like is not primarily a new bound anthology. It would look like the routine inclusion of “Twilight of Idols” in any syllabus that teaches “Politics and the English Language”; the reading of “People of Color in Louisiana” alongside The Souls of Black Folk; the placement of Meynell’s “The Rhythm of Life” next to Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth” rather than in a bibliography. The link is already available. What is missing is the editorial will to use it.
Bibliography
Meynell, “The Rhythm of Life” (1893).The Rhythm of Life, and Other Essays (Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1893; Project Gutenberg e-text 1276; Internet Archive, rhythmoflifeando00meynuoft). Coventry Patmore, Religio Poetae (George Bell & Sons, 1893). Letters from George Meredith to Alice Meynell 1896–1907 (Nonesuch, 1923). June Badeni, The Slender Tree: A Life of Alice Meynell (Tabb House, 1981). Ana Parejo Vadillo, Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism (Palgrave, 2005). The Rhythm of Life, ed. Ange Mlinko (Carcanet, 2021).
Repplier, “The Passing of the Essay” (1894).In the Dozy Hours, and Other Papers (Houghton, Mifflin, 1894; Project Gutenberg e-text 58942; Internet Archive, indozyhoursother00repp). Atlantic Monthly 73 (February 1894). Emma Repplier, Agnes Repplier: A Memoir (Dorrance, 1957). George Stewart Stokes, Agnes Repplier: Lady of Letters (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1949). Encyclopedia of the Essay, ed. Tracy Chevalier (Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997).
Miller, “As to The Leopard’s Spots” (1905).As to The Leopard’s Spots: An Open Letter to Thomas Dixon, Jr. (Hayworth, 1905; Library of Congress rbaapc/19201; Internet Archive, astoleopardsspot00mill). Race Adjustment (Neale, 1908). August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915 (Univ. of Michigan Press, 1963). Dickson Bruce Jr., Black American Writing from the Nadir (LSU Press, 1989). Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color (Indiana Univ. Press, 1990).
Middleton, “On Knowing London” (1913).Monologues (T. Fisher Unwin, 1913; Mitchell Kennerley, 1914; Internet Archive, monologues_1703_librivox). Spectator, 18 October 1913, p. 25. Arthur Machen, preface to The Ghost Ship and Other Stories (Fisher Unwin, 1912). Henry Savage, Richard Middleton: The Man and His Work (Cecil Palmer, 1922). Frank Harris, Contemporary Portraits (Mitchell Kennerley, 1915).
Thomas, “How I Began” (1913).T.P.’s Weekly, 31 January 1913. The Last Sheaf, foreword by Thomas Seccombe (Jonathan Cape, 1928; HathiTrust 001025865). The South Country (Dent, 1909; Project Gutenberg e-text 60760). R. George Thomas, Edward Thomas: A Portrait (Oxford Univ. Press, 1985). Matthew Hollis, Now All Roads Lead to France (Faber, 2011). Edna Longley, ed., The Annotated Collected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2008).
Dunbar-Nelson, “People of Color in Louisiana” (1916–17).Journal of Negro History 1:4 (October 1916): 361–376; 2:1 (January 1917): 51–78 (JSTOR 3035611 and 2713476). Charles B. Roussève, The Negro in Louisiana (Xavier Univ. Press, 1937). Gloria T. Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (Indiana Univ. Press, 1987). Katherine Adams, “‘A Study in Social Conditions,’” Legacy 33:2 (2016). Tara T. Green, Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (Bloomsbury, 2022).
Bourne, “The Twilight of Idols” (1917).The Seven Arts 2:6 (October 1917): 688–702. Untimely Papers, ed. James Oppenheim (B. W. Huebsch, 1919; Project Gutenberg e-text 68626). John Dewey, “Conscription of Thought,” New Republic 12:148 (17 September 1917). Bruce Clayton, Forgotten Prophet: The Life of Randolph Bourne (LSU Press, 1984). Leslie J. Vaughan, Randolph Bourne and the Politics of Cultural Radicalism (Univ. Press of Kansas, 1997). Olaf Hansen, ed., The Radical Will (Urizen, 1977).
Macaulay, “Problems of a Writer’s Life” (1925).A Casual Commentary (Methuen, 1925; Boni & Liveright, 1926; HathiTrust 000538751 and 009954767). Virginia Woolf, Diary, Vol. 3, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Hogarth, 1980). Jane Emery, Rose Macaulay: A Writer’s Life (John Murray, 1991). Sarah LeFanu, Rose Macaulay (Virago, 2003). Benjamin Schwarz and James Campbell, “The Worldly and Unworldly Fortunes of Rose Macaulay,” The New Criterion (2003).
Rogers, “Who Is the New Negro, and Why?” (1927).The Messenger 9:3 (March 1927), pp. 68 ff. (Marxists Internet Archive, messenger/index.htm). J. A. Rogers: Selected Writings, ed. Louis J. Parascandola (University of Tennessee Press; JSTOR jj.9669490). Theodore Kornweibel Jr., No Crystal Stair: Black Life and the Messenger, 1917–1928 (Greenwood, 1975). Thabiti Asukile’s scholarship on Rogers.
Knister, “The Canadian Short Story” (1928).Canadian Short Stories, ed. Raymond Knister (Macmillan of Canada, 1928; Books for Libraries Press, 1971; Dalhousie Digital Editions; HathiTrust 001441878). Leo Kennedy, “Raymond Knister,” Canadian Forum 12 (1931). Dorothy Livesay, memoir in Collected Poems of Raymond Knister (Ryerson, 1949). Anne Burke, ed., Raymond Knister: An Annotated Bibliography (ECW Press, 1981). Gregory Betts, ed., After Exile (Exile Editions, 2003).
Researcher’s Note
The four-criteria test was applied strictly. Every case above has a working URL, verified contemporary notice, a documented forgetting mechanism, and confirmed absence from the listed anthologies in their most recent editions.
Several specific hedges should be recorded. The Patmore quotation on Meynell is documented by Katherine Brégy’s The Poets’ Chantry (1912), which attributes it to Patmore’s 1892 Fortnightly Review essay and the 1893 Religio Poetae reprint; the page in Patmore’s own 1893 volume has not been independently verified, though the attribution chain is stable. The W. E. Henley remark about “The Rhythm of Life” survives in the Meynell family tradition as recorded in Carcanet’s 2021 reissue introduction; the record is partial, and no periodical review by Henley has been independently traced. The Virginia Woolf diary remark on Macaulay is quoted from Schwarz and Campbell’s 2003 New Criterion essay, which cites Bell’s edition of the Woolf Diary, Volume 3, without a page reference; verification against Bell was not independently undertaken. For Kelly Miller, a signed contemporary review in the New York Age or the Washington Bee would strengthen the contemporary-notice evidence; the pamphlet’s documented “Second ten thousand” imprint and the Voice of the Negro editorial-board context carry the case in the interim, but the Black newspaper archives are paywalled and could not be directly interrogated.
Re-verification in September 2026 confirmed the following directly: the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, third edition, carries three Dunbar-Nelson poems and none of her essays or fiction, and neither Miller nor Rogers appears anywhere in its table of contents; Gross’s Oxford Book of Essays includes Meynell’s “Under the Early Stars” and Macaulay’s “Evening Parties,” exactly as the entries state; the Marxists.org Messenger archive is essentially complete, with all twelve 1927 issues posted; and the Dalhousie, Gutenberg, and Internet Archive texts all load. Corrections applied at re-verification: the Seven Arts patron’s name (Annette Rankine; an erroneous name appeared in the research file), Knister’s age at death (thirty-three), Repplier’s honors (degrees from Pennsylvania, Yale, Columbia, and Marquette, with Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal), the “proletarian-aristocrat” phrase reattributed to the 1919 foreword itself, and the Rogers reprint recited to the Parascandola edition on JSTOR. The previously robot-blocked links were then checked before publication: the Spectator’s 18 October 1913 notice was opened in the magazine’s online archive, and the quotations above follow its text; both JSTOR articles load free as part of an Open JSTOR Collection, with volume, issue, and page numbers as cited; the HathiTrust catalog records sit behind an automated-traffic check, and their contents are corroborated at the Online Books Page, which lists The Last Sheaf (Cape, 1928) with HathiTrust page images alongside the Macaulay editions; and the New Criterion essay is live but subscriber-gated, so the Woolf diary remark keeps its citation-chain hedge above.
Several candidates were investigated and dropped. George Schuyler’s “The Negro-Art Hokum” and Marita Bonner’s “On Being Young, a Woman, and Colored” were both confirmed present in Gates and Smith’s Norton Anthology of African American Literature and therefore fail the absence test. William Stanley Braithwaite’s “The Negro in American Literature” was expanded and reprinted in Locke’s New Negro (1925), which is itself widely excerpted; its visibility disqualifies it. Marcus Clarke’s preface to Adam Lindsay Gordon’s poems and A. G. Stephens’s and Christopher Brennan’s Bulletin-era essays are in Salusinszky’s Oxford Book of Australian Essays and fail the absence test; the Australian tradition is therefore unrepresented in this final ten, and the collection admits the gap. John Jay Chapman’s Practical Agitation (1900) and Paul Rosenfeld’s Port of New York (1924) both passed the four criteria and would have been included in a list of twelve; Chapman yielded to Repplier because Repplier’s Collected-Works-liquidation mechanism is cleaner, and Rosenfeld yielded to Bourne because the two share the Seven Arts venue and Bourne’s essay more directly demonstrates the mechanism of triple erasure. Vernon Lee’s travel essays have had enough recent Penguin and academic attention to make a pure absence claim uncertain; she is noted here rather than included. Isaac Rosenfeld’s Partisan Review essays pass three criteria cleanly, but the contemporary-notice documentation thins outside Saul Bellow’s posthumous tribute. AE (George Russell) appears in the Field Day Anthology and fails the absence test; Daniel Corkery’s The Hidden Ireland is a book-length treatise excluded by the scope rule.
The balance of the final ten is three British, two American, three Black American, one Black American woman on the scholarly-journal axis, and one Canadian. The Irish and Australian traditions are not represented; the honest reason is that both national canons have been more thoroughly anthologized (Field Day, Salusinszky) than the Anglo-American periodical archive, which leaves fewer cases that pass absence-testing. This is itself a finding: national anthology-building, when it happens, is the most effective preservative mechanism the essay has, and its absence in the United States and Britain is why this collection is mostly American and British.
Every URL in this document was re-checked in September 2026; readers encountering a dead link should substitute the HathiTrust or Internet Archive catalog page, both of which hold redundant copies of nearly every item listed. The essay, this collection wants to show, survives at the link level. What it lacks is the syllabus.