Susan Orlean has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992. She has also written for The Rolling Stone, Vogue, Esquire, and Outside. She is also a nonfiction novelist, whose most famous book, The Orchid Thief, was adapted into a movie. She has also received a Nieman Fellowship, a prestigious award from Harvard school of journalism.
Her essay "The American Male at Age Ten" details the time Orlean spent with ten year old boy Colin Duffy. Orlean spends the essay giving many short anecdotes about Collin and frequently using dialogue that she takes from Collin and his friends. She opens the essay with a brief description of Collin, from his appearance to his interests. She then talks about his school, she details the social structure of the fifth grade classroom and shows us more about Collin through dialog. She continues on describing Collins social and home life. She focuses on many key aspects of Collin's life such as the girls in his class, his relationship with his friends, his dreams for the future, his obsession with money, and a rather detailed segment on Street Fighter II.
The essay is centralized around dialogue between Orlean and Collin and thus, much like the inner dialogue of a ten year old, jumps between many different topics very quickly. This is done effectively however, and in such a way that helps to both characterize Collin very deeply in a very short amount of time, and support Orleans overall purpose in the essay. The essay acts as a general spectacle on the point in you at which one is between adolescence and childhood. When the typical naivete of children begins to fade. She highlights this masterfully in the very conclusion of her essay. When she explains Collins creation of a spider web trap. It seems like a childish game but it also highlights Collin's increasing maturity and complexity. With him saying to her "You
could do it with thread, but the fishing line is invisible. Now I have this perfect thing and the only one who knows about it is me."
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