One Hundred Great Essays (Penguin Academics Series) Book

Preface

Introduction: Reading and Writing

* indicates readings that are new to this edition

1. Gloria Anzaldua How to Tame a Wild Tongue

2. *Kwame Anthony Appiah Facts on the Ground

3. Francis Bacon Of Studies

4. Russell Baker Growing Up

5. James Baldwin Notes of a Native Son

6. Dave Barry Road Warrior

7. Roland Barthes Toys

8. Sven Birkerts Into the Electronic Millennium

9. Judy Brady I Want a Wife

10. Jane Brox Influenza

11. Angela Carter The Wound in the Face

12. Lord Chesterfield Letter to His Son

13. *Christopher Claussen Against Work

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

15. K.C. Cole Calculated Risks

16. Charles Darwin Natural Selection

17. Joan Didion Marrying Absurd

18. Joan Didion On Self-Respect

19. Annie Dillard Living Like Weasels

20. *Annie Dillard Heaven and earth in Jest

21. John Donne No Man is an Island

22. Frederick Douglass Learning to Read and Write

23. Brian Doyle Joyas Voladoras

24. W.E.B. DuBois Of Our Spiritual Striving

25. Andre Dubus Lights of the Long Night

26. Gretel Ehrlich About Men

27. Queen Elizabeth I Speech to the Troops at Tilbury

28. Ralph Ellison Living with Music

29. *Anne Fadiman Birth

30. Richard Feynman The Value of Science

31. Benjamin Franklin Arriving at Perfection

32. Sigmund Freud The Interpretation of Dreams

33. *Henry Louis Gates In the Kitchen

34. *Matthew Ghoulish Criticism

35. Ellen Goodman The Company Man

36. Mary Gordon More Than Just a Shrine–Ellis Island

37. William Hazlitt On the Pleasure of Hating

38. *Linda Hogan Dwellings

39. Michael Hogan The Colonel

40. Barbara Holland Naps

41. Langston Hughes Salvation

42. *Zora Neale Hurston How It Feels to Be Colored Me

43. Pico Iyer Nowhere Man

44. Thomas Jefferson The Declaration of Independence

45. Yoshida Kenko 189 365

46. *Jamaica Kincaid On Seeing England for the First Time

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

48. *Stephen King Why We Crave Horror Movies

49. Maxine Hong Kingston On Discovery

50. August Kleinzhaler The Dog, the Family: A Household Tale

51. Robin Tolmach Lakoff You Are What You Say

52. D.H. Lawrence On Benjamin Franklin’s Vitrues

53. Abraham Lincoln The Gettysburg Address

54. Niccolo Machiavelli The Morals of the Prince

55. *Nancy Mairs On Being a Cripple

56. Karl Marx & Frederich Engels The Communist Manifesto

57. H.L. Mencken Portrait of an Ideal World

58. *Laura Miller Cat People vs. Dog People

59. Horace Miner Body Language of the Nacirema

60. N. Scott Momaday The Way to Rainy Mountain

61. Michel de Montaigne Of Smalls

62. *Bharati Mukherjee Imagining Homelands

63. Nuala O’Faolain Are You Somebody?

64. George Orwell Politics and the English Language

65. George Orwell Shooting an Elephant

66. *Cynthia Ozick The Seam of the Snail

67. Plato The Allegory of the Cave

68. Katherine Anne Porter The Necessary Enemy

69. Anna Quindlen Between the Sexes a Great Divide

70.
• Clotaire Rapaille Working for a Living: The Codes for Work and Money

71. Richard Rodriguez Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood

72. *Judy Ruiz Oranges and Sweet Sister Boy

73. Nicola Sacco Letter from Charleston State Prison

74. Scott Russell Sanders Under the Influence

75. Luc Sante What Secrets Tell

76. Chief Seattle Speech on the Signing of the Treaty of Port Elliott

77. David Sedaris Me Talk Pretty One Day

78. *David Sedaris Cyclops

79. Leonard Shlain Nonverbal/Verbal

80.
• Lee Siegel The World That Is the Case

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

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

83. Elizabeth Cady Stanton Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions

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

85. Shelby Steele On Being Black and Middle Class

86. Jonathan Swift A Modest Proposal

87. Margaret Talbot Les Tres Riches Heures de Martha Stewart

88. Amy Tan Mother Tongue

89. Lewis Thomas The Corner of the Eye

90. Henry David Thoreau Why I Went to the Woods

91. Sojourner Truth Ain’t I a Woman?

92. Mark Twain Reading the River

93. *Alice Walker Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self

94. *David Foster Wallace Consider the Lobster

95. Eudora Welty From Listening

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

97. Geoffrey Wolfe The Duke of Deception

98. Mary Wollstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

99. Virginia Woolf The Death of the Moth

100. Virginia Woolf Professions for Women