Preface.
INTRODUCTION

Francis Bacon, Of Studies
* Roland Barthes, Toys
Judith Ortiz Cofer, Casa: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood
* Charles Darwin, Natural Selection
Joan Didion, Marrying Absurd
Annie Dillard, Living Like Weasels
* W.E.B. DuBois, Of Our Spiritual Striving
Frederick Douglass, Learning to Read and Write
Gretel Ehrlich, About Men
Benjamin Franklin, Arriving at Perfection
William Hazlitt, On the Pleasure of Hating
* Michael Hogan, The Colonel
Langston Hughes, Salvation
Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail
Maxine Hong Kingston, On Discovery
N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain
Michel de Montaigne, Of Smells
George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant
Susan Sontag, A Woman’s Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source?
Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal
Amy Tan, Mother Tongue
* Henry David Thoreau, Why I Went to the Woods
James Thurber, University Days
E.B. White, Once More to the Lake
Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth

An * indicates sections that are new to this edition.