50 Essays

Preface for Instructors

Alternate Tables of Contents

     By Rhetorical Mode

     By Purpose

     By Theme

     By Paired Readings

     By Chronological Order

Introduction for Students: Active Reading, Critical Thinking, and the Writing Process

     Student Essay: Jonathon Schaff, "Dangerous Duality: How Racism Splits Us in Two"

Sherman Alexie, The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me

Maya Angelou, Graduation

Gloria Anzaldúa, How to Tame a Wild Tongue

Barbara Lazear Ascher, On Compassion

James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

Dave Barry, Turkeys in the Kitchen

William F. Buckley, Why Don't We Complain?

*Alan Burdick, The Truth About Invasive Species

*Nicholas Carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Judith Ortiz Cofer, The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria

*Joan Didion, Holy Water

Frederick Douglass, Learning to Read and Write

*Brian Doyle, Joyas Voladores

Barbara Ehrenreich, Serving in Florida

Lars Eighner, On Dumpster Diving

*Nora Ephron, The Boston Photographs

Stephanie Ericsson, The Ways We Lie

*Malcolm Gladwell, Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted

Langston Hughes, Salvation

Zora Neale Hurston, How It Feels to Be Colored Me

Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence

*Jamaica Kincaid, The Ugly Tourist

Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

*Stephen King, Reading to Write

Maxine Hong Kingston, No Name Woman

Verlyn Klinkenborg, Our Vanishing Night

*Jonathan Lethem, 13, 1977, 21

Audre Lorde, The Fourth of July

Nancy Mairs, On Being a Cripple

Malcolm X, Learning to Read

N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain

Bharati Mukherjee, Two Ways to Belong in America

George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant

Plato, Allegory of the Cave

*Michael Pollan, Why Bother?

Richard Rodriguez, Aria: Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood

Mike Rose, "I Just Wanna Be Average"

David Sedaris, A Plague of Tics

*Charles Simic, A Reunion with Boredom

*Peter Singer, The Singer Solution to World Poverty

*Susan Sontag, A Woman’s Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source?

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Declaration of Sentiments

Brent Staples, Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Space

*John Jeremiah Sullivan, Feet in Smoke

Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal

Amy Tan, Mother Tongue

*Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

E. B. White, Once More to the Lake

*Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare’s Sister

Documentation Guide

Glossary of Writing Terms

*New to this edition