Personal Accounts
*
Joan Didion, On Going Home
* Anne Fadiman, Night Owl
* Maya Angelou, Graduation
* Lars Eighner, On Dumpster Diving
* Nancy Mairs, On Being A Cripple
* Alice Walker, Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self
* Jennifer Sinor, Confluences
* E.B. White, Once More to the Lake
Portraits of People and Places
*
Scott Russell Sanders, Under the Influence
* Annie Dillard, from An American Childhood
* Toni Morrison, Strangers
* N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain
* Jhumpa Lahiri, Rhode Island
* Ian Frazier, Take the F
* David Guterson, Enclosed, Enclopedic, Endured: The Mall of America
Human Nature
*
Scott Russell Sanders, Looking at Women
* Anna Quindlen, Between the Sexes, a Great Divide
* Andrew Sullivan, What Is a Homosexual?
* Henry Petroski, Falling Down Is Part of Growing Up
* Jane Smiley, Belly, Dancing, Belly, Aching, Belly, Beasts
* Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, On the Fear of Death
Cultural Analysis
*
Nicholas Carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid?
* Anna Quindlen, Stuff Is Not Salvation
* Molly Ivins, Get a Knife, Get a Dog, but Get Rid of Guns
* Jessica Mitford, Behind the Formaldehyde Curtain
* Henry Louis Gates, Jr., In the Kitchen
* Nicholas D. Kristof, Saudis in Bikinis
* Fred Strebeigh, The Wheels of Freedom: Bicycles in China
* Brent Staples, Black Men and Public Space
Education
*
Frederick Douglass, Learning to Read
* John Holt, How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading
* Jonathan Kozol, Fremont High School
* William Zinsser, College Pressures
* Brent Staples, Why Colleges Shower Their Students with A’s
* Caroline Bird, College Is a Waste of Time and Money
* Mike Rose, Blue-Collar Brilliance
Language and Communication
*
Gloria Naylor, “Mommy, What Does ‘Nigger’ Mean?”
* Maxine Hong Kingston, Tongue-Tied
* Richard Rodriguez, Aria
* John McWhorter, The Cosmopolitan Tongue
* Garrison Keillor, How to Write a Letter and Postcards
* Stephen King, On Writing
* George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
An Album of Styles
*
Francis Bacon, Of Youth and Age
* John Donne, No Man Is an Island
* Samuel Johnson, Against Wicked Characters
* Mary Wollstonecraft, from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
* Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address
* Ambrose Bierce, from The Devil’s Dictionary
* Ernest Hemingway, from A Farewell to Arms
* Martin Luther King, from I Have a Dream
* Joan Didion, from On Going Home
* John McPhee, from Under the Snow
* Molly Ivins, from Get a Knife, Get a Dog, but Get Rid of Guns
* Ian Frazier, from Take the F
* H. Bruce Franklin, from From Realism to Virtual Reality: Images of America’s Wars
Nature and the Environment
*
Edward Abbey, The Serpents of Paradise
* Brian Doyle, Joyas Voladoras
* John McPhee, Under the Snow
* Chief Seattle, Letter to President Pierce, 1855
* Al Gore, The Climate Emergency
* Terry Tempest Williams, The Clan of One-Breasted Women
Ethics
*
Mark Twain, Advice to Youth
* Steven Pinker, The Moral Instinct
* Peter Singer, What Should a Billionaire Give?
* Jonathan Rauch, In Defense of Prejudice
* Michael Levin, The Case for Torture
* Michael Pollan, An Animal’s Place
* Sallie Tisdale, We Do Abortions Here: A Nurse’s Story
* Atul Gawande, When Doctors Make Mistakes
History
*
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Slogan: “Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History”
* Barbara Tuchman, “This Is the End of the World”: The Black Death
* Hannah Arendt, Deportations from Western Europe
* Alberto Manguel, The Library as Survival
* Walt Whitman, The Death of Lincoln
* Henry David Thoreau, The Battle of the Ant
* H. Bruce Franklin, From Realism to Virtual Reality: Images of America’s War
Politics and Government
* George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant
* Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal
* Niccolo Machiavelli, The Morals of the Prince
* Thomas Jefferson and Others, The Declaration of Independence
* Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions
* Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address
* John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address
* Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail
Science and Technology
* Jacob Bronowski, The Nature of Scientific Reasoning
* Isaac Asimov, The Eureka Phenomenon
* Nicholson Baker, The Charms of Wikipedia
* Stephen Hawking, Is Everything Determined?
* Edward O. Wilson, Intelligent Evolution
* Stephen Jay Gould, Darwin’s Middle Road
Literature, The Arts, and Media
* Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings
* Vladimir Nabokov, Good Readers and Good Writers
* Virginia Woolf, In Search of a Room of One’s Own
* Michael Chabon, Kids’ Stuff
* Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics
* Aaron Copland, How We Listen
* Gene Weingarten, Pearls before Breakfast
Philosophy and Religion
* Langston Hughes, Salvation
* Reg Saner, My Fall into Knowledge
* Henry David Thoreau, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
* Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth
* Annie Dillard, Sight into Insight
* Plato, Allegory of the Cave
* Zen Parables, Muddy Road, a Parable, Learning to be Silent
* Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism