Twenty-Five Great Essays Book

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Preface.

INTRODUCTION

Francis Bacon, Of Studies

* Roland Barthes, Toys

Judith Ortiz Cofer, Casa: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood

* Charles Darwin, Natural Selection

Joan Didion, Marrying Absurd

Annie Dillard, Living Like Weasels

* W.E.B. DuBois, Of Our Spiritual Striving

Frederick Douglass, Learning to Read and Write

Gretel Ehrlich, About Men

Benjamin Franklin, Arriving at Perfection

William Hazlitt, On the Pleasure of Hating

* Michael Hogan, The Colonel

Langston Hughes, Salvation

Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

Maxine Hong Kingston, On Discovery

N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain

Michel de Montaigne, Of Smells

George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant

Susan Sontag, A Woman’s Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source?

Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal

Amy Tan, Mother Tongue

* Henry David Thoreau, Why I Went to the Woods

James Thurber, University Days

E.B. White, Once More to the Lake

Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth