One Hundred Great Essays (Penguin Academics)

One Hundred Great Essays is published as part of the Penguin Academics Series, a series of low-cost, high-quality offerings.

One Hundred Great Essays collects one-hundred of the most teachable and rewarding essays. The anthology combines classic, commonly taught essays with frequently anthologized contemporary essays by today's most highly regarded writers. The selections are broadly diverse in both subject matter and authorship. Essays have been selected as both models for good writing and useful springboards for writing. An introductory section discusses the qualities of the essay form and offers instruction on how to read essays critically, and shows how to use the writing process to develop their own essays.

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