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.
An Overview of the Writing Process.

1. Gloria Anzaldua, How to Tame a Wild Tongue.
2. Francis Bacon, Of Studies.
3. Dave Barry, Road Warrior.
4. **Roland Barthes, Toys
5. Susan Brownmiller, Femininity.
6. Judith Ortiz Cofer, Casa: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood.
7. ** K.C. Cole, Calculated Risks
8. Bernard Cooper, Burl's.
9. ** Charles Darwin, Natural Selection
10. Joan Didion, Marrying Absurd.
11. Annie Dillard, Living Like Weasels.
12. ** Brian Doyle, Joyas Voladoras
13. ** W.E.B.DuBois, Of Our Spiritual Striving
14. Frederick Douglass, Learning to Read and Write.
15. Gretel Ehrlich, About Men.
16. Ralph Ellison, Living with Music.
17. ** Richard Feynman, The Value of Science
18. Benjamin Franklin, Arriving at Perfection.
19. ** John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History
20. Ellen Goodman, The Company Man.
21. Mary Gordon, More than Just a Shrine?Ellis Island.
22. William Hazlitt, On the Pleasures of Hating.
23. ** Michael Hogan, The Colonel
24. Langston Hughes, Salvation.
25. Pico Iyer, Nowhere Man.
26. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail.
27. Maxine Hong Kingston, No Name Woman.
28. Charles Lamb, A Bachelor's Complaint.
29. Chang-Rae Lee, Coming Home Again.
30. Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address.
31. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Morals of the Prince.
32. ** James McBride, Shul/School
33. N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain.
34. Michel de Montaigne, Of Smells.
35. ** Nuala O’Faolain, Are You Somebody?
36. George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant.
37. Cynthia Ozick, The Seam of the Snail.
38. ** Neil Postman, The Medium Is the Metaphor
39. Scott Russell Sanders, Under the Influence.
40. Susan Sontag, A Woman's Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source?
41. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions.
42. Brent Staples, Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Space.
43. Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal.
44. Amy Tan, Mother Tongue.
45. ** Henry David Thoreau, Why I Went to the Woods
46. James Thurber, University Days.
47. Sojourner Truth, Ain’t I a Woman?
48. E.B. White, Once More to the Lake.
49. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women.
50. Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth.

An * indicates a selection that is new to this edition.