Fifty Great Essays Book

Gloria Anzaldúa, How to Tame a Wild Tongue

Francis Bacon, Of Studies

James Baldwin, If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me What Is

Dave Barry, Road Warrior

Roland Barthes, Toys

Sven Birkerts, Into the Electronic Millennium

Judy Brady, I Want a Wife

G. K. Chesterton, The Fallacy of Success

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

Bernard Cooper, Labyrinthine

Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

Annie Dillard, Living Like Weasels

Mark Doty, Souls on Ice

Brian Doyle, Joyas Voladoras

Gretel Ehrlich, About Men

Ralph Ellison, Living with Music

Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point

Ellen Goodman, The Company Man

Michael Hogan, The Colonel

Barbara Holland, Naps

Langston Hughes, Salvation

Zora Neale Hurston, How It Feels to Be Colored Me

Stephen King, Why We Crave Horror Movies

Barbara Kingsolver, Stone Soup

Maxine Hong Kingston, On Discovery

August Kleinzahler, The Dog, The Family: A Household Tale

Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address

John McPhee, Silk Parachute

Herman Melville, The Advocate

Laura Miller, Cat People vs. Dog People

Horace Miner, Body Ritual Among the Nacirema

N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain

Michelle de Montaigne, Of Smells

George Orwell, Some Thoughts on the Common Toad

Scott Russell Sanders, The Men We Carry In Our Minds

David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

Lee Siegel, The World Is All That Is the Case

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

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

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions

Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal

Lewis Thomas, Crickets, Cats, Bats, & Chaos

Henry David Thoreau, Why I Went to the Woods

Sojourner Truth, Ain’t I a Woman?

Mark Twain, Reading the Mississippi River

Alice Walker, Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self

David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster

Geoffrey Wolff, The Duke of Deception

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth