One Hundred Great Essays Book

* indicates new selections.

Preface.

Introduction: Reading and Writing Essays.

History and Context.

Pleasures of the Essay.

Types of Essays.

Reading Essays.

Reading Annie Dillard's “Living Like Weasels.”

Writing Essays.

Arriving at an Interpretation.

1. Gloria Anzaldua, How to Tame a Wild Tongue

2. Francis Bacon, Of Studies

3. Russell Baker, Growing Up

4. James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

5. Dave Barry, Road Warrior

6. **Roland Barthes, Toys

7. Mary Catherine Bateson, Attending a World

8. Sven Birkerts, Into the Electric Millennium

9. Judy Brady, I Want a Wife

10. Susan Brownmiller, Femininity

11. Jane Brox, Influenza 1918

12. Angela Carter, The Wound in the Face

13. **Lord Chesterfield, Letter to His Son

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

15. K. C. Cole, Calculated Risks

16. Bernard Cooper, Burl’s

17. Aaron Copland, How We Listen

18. Charles Darwin, Natural Selection

19. Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination

20. Joan Didion, Marrying Absurd

21. Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

22. Annie Dillard, Living Like Weasels

23. John Donne, No Man Is an Island

24. Frederick Douglass, Learning to Read and Write

25. ** Brian Doyle, Joyas Voladoras

26. W. E. B. Du Bois, Of Our Spiritual Striving

27. ** Andre Dubus, Lights of the Long Night

28. Gretel Ehrlich, About Men

29. Queen Elizabeth I, Speech to the Troops at Tilbury

30. Ralph Ellison, Living with Music

31. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

32. Anne Fadiman, Never Do That to a Book

33. ** Richard Feynman, The Value of Science

34. ** Kitty Burns Florey, Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog
35.Benjamin Franklin, Arriving at Perfection

36. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams

37. ** John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History

38. ** Ellen Gilchrist, The Middle Way

39. Ellen Goodman, The Company Man

40. Mary Gordon, More than Just a Shrine–Ellis Island

41. William Hazlitt, On the Pleasure of Hating

42. ** Michael Hogan, The Colonel

43. Barbara Holland, Naps

44. Langston Hughes, Salvation

45. Pico Iyer, Nowhere Man

46. Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence

47. ** Yoshida Kenko, Essay #189

48. Jamaica Kincaid, On Seeing England for the First Time

49. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

50. Martin Luther King, Jr., I Have a Dream

51. Maxine Hong Kingston, On Discovery

52. ** August Kleinzahler, The Dog, the Family: A Household Tale

53. Charles Lamb, A Bachelor’s Complaint

54. Robin Tolmach Lakoff, You Are What You Say

55. D. H. Lawrence, On Ben Franklin’s Virtues

56. Chang-rae Lee, Coming Home Again

57. ** Michael Lewis, The Curse of Talent

58. Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address

59. Barry Lopez, The Stone Horse

60. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Morals of the Prince

61. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

62. ** James McBride, Shul/School

63. H. L. Mencken, Portrait of an Ideal World

64. Howard Miner, Body Ritual Among the Nacirema

65. N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain

66. Michel de Montaigne, Of Smells

67. ** Nuala O’Faolain, Are You Somebody

68. George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

69. George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant

70. **Cynthia Ozick, The Din in the Head

71. Plato, The Allegory of the Cave

72. Katherine Anne Porter, The Necessary Enemy

73. ** Neil Postman, The Medium is the Metaphor

74. Anna Quindlen, Between the Sexes, A Great Divide

75. Richard Rodriguez, Aria: Memories of a Bilingual Childhood

76. ** Niccolo Sacco, Letter to His Son

77. ** Scott Russell Sanders, The Inheritance of Tools

78. Luc Sante, What Secrets Tell

79. Chief Seattle, Speech on the Signing of the Treaty of Port Elliott

80. ** David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

81. Leonard Shlain, Verbal/Nonverbal

82. Leslie Marmon Silko, Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination

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

84. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions

85. Brent Staples, Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Space

86. Shelby Steele, On Being Black and Middle Class

87. Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal

88. Margaret Talbot, Les Tres Riches Heures de Martha Stewart

89. Amy Tan, Mother Tongue

90. Lewis Thomas, The Corner of the Eye

91. Henry David Thoreau, Why I Went to the Woods

92. James Thurber, University Days

93. Sojourner Truth, And Ain’t I a Woman

94. Mark Twain, Reading the River

95. Eudora Welty, from “Listening”

96. E. B. White, Once More to the Lake

97. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women

98. ** Geoffrey Woolf, The Duke of Deception

99. Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth

100. Virginia Woolf, Professions for Women