Introduction: reading and writing essays
Graduation / Maya Angelou
How to tame a wild tongue / Gloria Anzaldúa
Of studies / Francis Bacon
Notes of a native son / James Baldwin
Road warrior / Dave Barry
Femininity / Susan Brownmiller
The myth of the Latin woman: I just met a girl named Maria / Judith Ortiz Cofer
Marrying absurd / Joan Didion
Living like weasels / Annie Dillard
Learning to read and write / Frederick Douglass
About men / Gretel Ehrlich
The flow of the river / Loren Eiseley
Living with music / Ralph Ellison
Nature / Ralph Waldo Emerson
What I believe / E.M. Forster
The company man / Ellen Goodman
Women's brains / Stephen Jay Gould
The courage of turtles / Edward Hoagland
Salvation / Langston Hughes
The Declaration of Independence / Thomas Jefferson
On seeing England for the first time / Jamaica Kincaid
Letter from Birmingham jail / Martin Luther King, Jr.
On discovery / Maxine Hong Kingston
The Gettysburg Address / Abraham Lincoln
The morals of the prince / Niccolò Machiavelli
On being a cripple / Nancy Mairs
The way to rainy mountain / N. Scott Momaday
Of smells / Michel de Montaigne
Shooting an elephant / George Orwell
The seam of the snail / Cynthia Ozick
Heading into darkness once again / Richard Rodriquez
Under the influence / Scott Russell Sanders
The masked marvel's last toehold / Richard Selzer
Declaration of sentiments and resolutions / Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Just walk on by: Black men and public space / Brent Staples
Different words, different worlds / Deborah Tannen
Why I went to the woods / Henry David Thoreau
University days / James Thurber
Aren't I a woman / Sojourner Truth
Reading the river / Mark Twain
Beauty: when the other dancer is the self / Alice Walker
Once more to the lake / E.B. White
Only one life / Tom Wolfe
A vindication of the rights of women / Mary Wollstonecraft
The death of the moth / Virginia Woolf
Writing and reading / Richard Wright.
