The best American essays of the century

Foreword / by Robert Atwan

Introduction / by Joyce Carol Oates

Corn-pone opinions / Mark Twain

Of the coming of John / W.E.B. Du Bois

A law of acceleration / Henry Adams

Stickeen / John Muir

The moral equivalent of war / William James

The handicapped / Randolph Bourne

Coatesville / John Jay Chapman

The devil baby at Hull-house / Jane Addams

Tradition and the individual talent / T.S. Eliot

Pamplona in July / Ernest Hemingway

The hills of Zion / H.L. Mencken

How it feels to be colored me / Zora Neale Hurston

The old stone house / Edmund Wilson

What are master-pieces and why are there so few of them / Gertrude Stein

The crack-up / F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sex Ex Machina / James Thurber

The ethics of living Jim Crow: an autobiographical sketch / Richard Wright

Knoxville: Summer of 1915 / James Agee

The figure a poem makes / Robert Frost

Once more to the lake / E.B. White

Insert flap "A" and throw away / S.J. Perelman

++

Bop / Langston Hughes

The future is now / Katherine Anne Porter

Artists in uniform / Mary McCarthy

The marginal world / Rachel Carson

Notes of a native son / James Baldwin

The brown wasps / Loren Eiseley

A sweet devouring / Eudora Welty

A hundred thousand straightened nails / Donald Hall

Letter from Birmingham jail / Martin Luther King, Jr.

Putting daddy on / Tom Wolfe

Notes on "Camp" / Susan Sontag

Perfect past / Vladimir Nabokov

The way to Rainy Rountain / N. Scott Momaday

The apotheosis of Martin Luther King / Elizabeth Hardwick

Illumination rounds / Michael Herr

I know why the caged bird sings / Maya Angelou

The lives of a cell / Lewis Thomas

The search for Marvin Gardens / John McPhee

The doomed in their sinking / William H. Gass

No name woman / Maxine Hong Kingston

Looking for Zora / Alice Walker

Women and honor: some notes on lying / Adrienne Rich

The white album / Joan Didion

++

Aria: a memoir of a bilingual childhood / Richard Rodriguez

The solace of open spaces / Gretel Ehrlich

Total eclipse / Annie Dillard

A drugstore in winter / Cynthia Ozick

Okinawa: the bloodiest battle of all / William Manchester

Heaven and nature / Edward Hoagland

The creation myths of Cooperstown / Stephen Jay Gould

Life with daughters: watching the miss America Pageant / Gerald Early

The disposable rocket / John Updike

They all just went away / Joyce Carol Oates

Graven images / Saul Bellow

Biographical notes

Appendix: Notable twentieth-century American literary nonfiction.