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.

1. Francis Bacon, Of Studies.
* 2. Judith Ortiz Cofer, Casa: A Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood.
3. Joan Didion, Marrying Absurd.
4. Annie Dillard, Living Like Weasels.
5. Frederick Douglass, Learning to Read and Write.
6. Gretel Ehrlich, About Men.
* 7. Benjamin Franklin, Arriving at Perfection.
* 8. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., In the Kitchen.
9. Stephen Jay Gould, Women's Brains.
* 10. William Hazlitt, On the Pleasures of Hating.
11. Langston Hughes, Salvation.
12. Jamaica Kincaid, On Seeing England for the First Time.
13. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail.
14. Maxine Hong Kingston, On Discovery.
15. N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain.
16. Michel de Montaigne, Of Smells.
17. George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant.
* 18. Alexander Petrunkevitch, The Spider and the Wasp.
19. Susan Sontag, A Woman's Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source?
* 20. Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal.
21. Amy Tan, Mother Tongue.
22. James Thurber, University Days.
23. Alice Walker, Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self.
24. E.B. White, Once More to the Lake.
25. Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth.