Essays

The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. DuBois (Of the Coming of John)
*Poetic epigraph followed by a bar from a negro spiritual*

The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams (A Law of Acceleration)
Stickeen, John Muir
The Moral Equivalent of War, William James
The Handicapped, Randolph Bourne
Coatesville, John Jay Chapman
The Devil-Baby at Hull House, Jane Addam
The Sacred Wood, T. S. Eliot (Tradition and the Individual Talent)
Pamplona in July, Ernest Hemingway
The Hills of Zion, H. L. Mencken
How It Feels to Be Colored Me, Zora Neale Hurston
The Old Stone House, Edmund Wilson
What Are Master-Pieces and Why Are There So Few Of Them, Gertrude Stein
The Crack-Up, F. Scott Fitzzgerald
Sex Ex Machina, James Thurber
The Ethics of Living Jim Crow, Richard Wright
Knoxville: Summer of 1915, James Agee
The Figure a Poem Makes, Robert Frost
Once More to the Lake, E. B. White
Insert Flap “A” And Throw Away, S. J. Perlman
Bop, Langston Hughes
The Future is Now, Kathrine Anne Porter
Artists in Uniform, Mary McCarthy
The Marginal World, Rachel Carson
Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin
The Brown Wasps, Loren Eiseley
A Sweet Devouring, Eudora Welty
A Hundred Thousand Straightened Nails, Donald Hall
Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther Kind, Jr.
Putting Daddy On, Tom Wolfe
Notes on “Camp”, Susan Sontag
Perfect Past, Vladimir Nabakov
The Way to Rainy Mountain, M. Scott Momaday
The Apotheosis of Martin Luther King, Elizabeth Hardwick
Illumination Rounds, Michael Herr
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
The Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas
The Search for Marvin Gardens, John McPhee
The Doomed in Their Sinking, William H. Gass
No Name Woman, Maxine Hong Kingston
Looking for Zora, Alice Walker
Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying, Adrienne Rich
The White Album, Joan Didion
Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood, Richard Rodriguez
The Solace of Open Spaces, Gretel Ehrlich
Total Eclipse, Annie Dillard
A Drugstore Winter, Cynthia Ozick
Okinawa: The Bloodiest Battle of All, William Manchester
Heaven and Nature, Edward Hoagland
The Creation Myths of Cooperstown, Stephen Jay Gould
Life With Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant, Gerald Early
The Disposable Rocket, John Updike
They All Just Went Away, Joyve Carol Oates
Graven Images, Saul Bellow