The Made-Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay

"As stimulating a discussion of the personal essay as I have ever encountered. With the accumulated wisdom of a lifetime of practicing and teaching the form, Klaus thoughtfully probes and generously upends his own and everyone else's pieties. We are deeply in his debt."---Phillip Lopate

"Quite simply, Carl Klaus's magnum opus: the book he has spent his entire writing life building toward: a persuasive and even moving summing up of everything he knows about the essay, especially the protean, inherently problematizing, stylized nature of the form. An extremely valuable correction to any misconception of `nonfiction as truth.'"---David Shields, author, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

"This book is a cabinet of finely balanced wonders: treatise and revelation, study and confession, provocation and lyric---but most of all, it's a love letter to the essay form. Carl Klaus approaches his subject, the complicated construction of a self on the page, with the curiosity, intellect, and innocence of an artist in love with and awed by his materials. As he reflects on essayists past and present as well as on his own prose, Klaus's insights grow ever more intimate. His is a sensibility engaged in the deepest, lifelong work an essayist can perform: the creation, nurturing, and refining of that ever-elusive yet companionable made-up self."---Lia Purpura, author, On Looking

"For decades, Carl Klaus convened a sometimes formal, sometimes informal Seminar on his Ouroboros-like obsession, his lifelong study: the essay on the essay. Nobody knows the history of the essay with his depth, discernment, and passion, and we are fortunate to now have this distillation of a distinguished career's work. Throughout he reminds us of the essay's restlessness, what he calls the form's `mocking refusal to play the academic game,' and its capaciousness, its formidable ability to challenge and renew our sense of the self and its worlding through words. A brilliant and brilliantly pithy book."---Tom Lutz, author, Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America.

Carl H. Klaus, founding director of the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program, professor emeritus at the University of Iowa, and coeditor of Sightline Books: The Iowa Series in Literary Nonfiction, is a diarist, essayist, and author or coauthor of several textbooks on writing. His nonfiction includes My Vegetable Love (Iowa paperback, 2000) and its companion Weathering Winter (Iowa, 1997) as well as Taking Retirement: A Beginner's Diary and Letters to Kate: Life after Life (Iowa, 2006).