Contents
Bold text indicates a selection new to the Twelfth Edition.
♦ indicates a selection that appears in the Full Edition only.
- Personal Report
- Chang-Rae Lee, Coming Home Again
- Joan Didion, On Going Home
- Andrea Barrett , A Hole in the Wall
- Lars Eighner, On Dumpster Diving
- ♦ Wallace Stegner, The Dump Ground
- Maya Angelou, Graduation
- ♦ Zora Neale Hurston, How It Feels to Be Colored Me
- ♦ Alberto Alvaro Rios, Green Cards
- Richard Selzer, The Knife
- ♦ Bruno Bettelheim, A Victim
- Nancy Mairs, On Being a Cripple
- Alice Walker, Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self
- ♦ David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster
- ♦ Loren Eiseley, The Brown Wasps
- ♦ Gary Soto, The Guardian Angel
- E. B. White, Once More to the Lake
- ♦ Prose Forms: Journals
- ♦ Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook
- ♦ Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Journals
- ♦ Henry David Thoreau, from Journal
- ♦ Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln
- ♦ Rachel Carson, from Field Notebooks
- ♦ Colby Buzzell, Killing Time in Iraq
- People, Places
- Scott Russell Sanders, Under the Influence
- Annie Dillard, from An American Childhood
- ♦ Virginia Woolf, My Father: Leslie Stephen
- ♦ Thomas Jefferson, George Washington
- ♦ Nathaniel Hawthorne, Abraham Lincoln
- ♦ Tom Wolfe, Yeager
- Toni Morrison, Strangers
- ♦ Eavan Boland, The Woman, the Place, the Poet
- Jamaica Kincaid, Sowers and Reapers
- Judith Ortiz Cofer, More Room
- N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain
- ♦ Barry Lopez, American Geographies
- Margaret Atwood, True North
- David Guterson, Enclosed. Encyclopedic. Endured: The Mall of America
- Human Nature
- ♦ Paul Theroux, Being a Man
- Scott Russell Sanders, Looking at Women
- Andrew Sullivan, What Is a Homosexual?
- Anna Quindlen, Between the Sexes, a Great Divide
- Lauren Slater, Love
- E. S. Maduro, Excuse Me While I Explode: My Mother, Myself, My Anger
- Amy Cunningham, Why Women Smile
- ♦ Gloria Steinem, The Good News Is: These Are Not the Best Years of Your Life
- ♦ Edward Thomas, Insomnia
- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On the Fear of Death
- Mary Roach, How to Know If You're Dead
- Cultural Critique
- Anthony Burgess, Is America Falling Apart?
- ♦ Adam Goodheart, 9.11.01: The Skyscraper and the Airplane
- Jessica Mitford, Behind the Formaldehyde Curtain
- ♦ Thomas Lynch, The Bang and the Whimper and the Boom
- ♦ Henry Louis Gates Jr., In the Kitchen
- ♦ Malcolm Gladwell, Java Man
- ♦ Sonia Shah, Tight Jeans and Chania Chorris
- Nicholas D. Kristof, Saudis in Bikinis
- ♦ Roland Barthes, Toys
- Fred Strebeigh, The Wheels of Freedom: Bicycles in China
- John McMurty, Kill ’Em! Crush ’Em! Eat ’Em Raw!
- ♦ Mark Greif, Against Exercise
- ♦ Betty Rollin, Motherhood: Who Needs It?
- Bill McKibben, The Case for Single-Child Families
- ♦ James Baldwin, Stranger in the Village
- Brent Staples, Black Men and Public Space
- Debra Dickerson, Who Shot Johnny?
- ♦ Prose Forms: Op-Eds
- Molly Ivins, Get a Knife, Get a Dog, but Get Rid of Guns
- ♦ Jo-Ann Pilardi, The Immigration Problem Is About Us, Not Them
- ♦ Anna Quindlen, In a Peaceful Frame of Mind
- Brent Staples, Why Colleges Shower Their Students with A’s
- David Brooks, The Gender Gap at School
- Jennifer Britz, The Dean's Daughter Gets Thin Envelope
- ♦ Henry Wechsler, Charles Deutsch, and George Dowdall, Too Many Colleges Are Still in Denial about Alcohol Abuse
- ♦ Jack Hitt, The Battle of the Binge
- ♦ Kenneth A. Bruffee, Binge Drinking as a Substitute for a "Community of Learning"
- Education
- Frederick Douglass, Learning to Read
- ♦ Eudora Welty, Clamorous to Learn
- ♦ David Chanoff, Education is My Mother and My Father
- John Holt, How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading
- ♦ Benjamin Barber, America Skips School
- Caroline Bird, College Is a Waste of Time and Money
- ♦ James Thurber, University Days
- William Zinsser, College Pressures
- Adrienne Rich, Taking Women Students Seriously
- William Golding, Thinking as a Hobby
- ♦ William G. Perry Jr., Examsmanship and the Liberal Arts
- Language and Communication
- Gloria Naylor, "Mommy, What Does ’Nigger’ Mean?"
- Maxine Hong Kingston, Tongue-Tied
- Richard Rodriguez, Aria
- Gloria Anzaldúa, How to Tame a Wild Tongue
- Marjorie Agosin, Always Living in Spanish
- Garrison Keillor, How to Write a Letter and Postcards
- Ben Franklin, Learning to Write
- Patricia Williams, The Death of the Profane: The Rhetoric of Race and Rights
- Anne Fadiman, The His’er Problem
- Lewis Thomas, Notes on Punctuation
- ♦ Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller, Period Styles: A Punctuated History
- ♦ Kitty Burns Florey, Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog
- ♦ Wayne C. Booth, Boring from Within: The Art of the Freshman Essay
- ♦ Dennis Baron, When Professors Get A's and Machines Get F's
- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
- An Album of Styles
- Francis Bacon, Of Youth and Age
- ♦ Ben Jonson, To Write Well
- John Donne, No Man Is an Island
- Samuel Johnson, The Pyramids
- ♦ Benjamin Franklin, from Poor Richard’s Almanack
- ♦ William Blake, Proverbs of Hell
- ♦ Ambrose Bierce, from The Devil’s Dictionary
- Mary Wollstonecraft, from A Vindication of the Rights of Women
- John Henry Newman, Knowledge and Virtue
- Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address
- Ernest Hemingway, from A Farewell to Arms
- ♦ E. B. White, Progress and Change
- ♦ John Updike, Beer Can
- Terry Tempest Williams, River Music
- Nature and the Environment
- Rachel Carson, Tides
- John Muir, A Wind-Storm in the Forests
- Edward Abbey, The Serpents of Paradise
- ♦ Allison Wallace, The Work of Honeybees
- Alexander Petrunkevitch, The Spider and the Wasp
- Chief Seattle, Letter to President Pierce, 1855
- Aldo Leopold, Marshland Elegy
- ♦ Mary Oliver, Waste Land: An Elegy
- ♦ William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness
- ♦ Joseph Wood Krutch, The Most Dangerous Predator
- ♦ Sandra Steingraber, Tune of the Tuna Fish
- Terry Tempest Williams, The Clan of One-Breasted Women
- Ethics
- ♦ Lord Chesterfield, Letter to His Son
- Mark Twain, Advice to Youth
- Jonathan Rauch, In Defense of Prejudice
- Michael Levin, The Case for Torture
- Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights
- Michael Pollan, An Animal's Place
- ♦ Carl Cohen, The Case for the Use of Animals in Biomedical Research
- ♦ Nora Ephron, The Boston Photographs
- Aldo Leopold, The Land Ethic
- Mary Gordon, A Moral Choice
- Sallie Tisdale, We Do Abortions Here: A Nurse’s Story
- ♦ Stephen Jay Gould, The Terrifying Normalcy of AIDS
- ♦ Kildare Dobbs, The Shatterer of Worlds
- Paul Fussell, Thank God for the Atom Bomb
- History
- Henry David Thoreau, The Battle of the Ants
- Barbara Tuchman, "This Is the End of the World": The Black Death
- Philip Alcabes, The Bioterrorism Scare: A Historical Perspective
- Walt Whitman, Death of Abraham Lincoln
- ♦ H. Bruce Franklin, From Realism to Virtual Reality: Images of America’s Wars
- Hannah Arendt, Deportations from Western Europe
- World War II: Victims, Villains, Heroes
- Matt Bai, He Said No to Internment
- Sara Corbett, Saved by Strangers
- Daniel Bergner, Chasing Evil
- ♦ Philip Gourevitch, After the Genocide
- ♦ Frances FitzGerald, Rewriting American History
- Politics and Government
- George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant
- Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal
- Niccolò Machiavelli, The Morals of the Prince
- ♦ Thomas Jefferson, Original Draft of the Declaration of Independence
- 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
- E. B. White, Democracy
- Lani Guinier, Tyranny of the Majority
- Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail
- Prose Forms: Spoken Words
- ♦ Martin Luther King Jr., I Have a Dream
- ♦ William Lloyd Garrison, No Compromise with Slavery
- ♦ Eleanor Roosevelt, On the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
- Al Gore, The Climate Emergency
- William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Award Speech
- ♦ James van Tholen, Surprised by Death
- Science and Technology
- Jacob Bronowski, The Nature of Scientific Reasoning
- Isaac Asimov, The Eureka Phenomenon
- ♦ Thomas S. Kuhn, The Route to Normal Science
- David Baltimore, Limiting Science: A Biologist's Perspective
- ♦ Matt Ridley, Genome
- Henry Wechsler, Andrea Davenport, George Dowdall, Barbara Moeykens, and Sonia Castillo, Health and Behavioral Consequences of Binge Drinking in College: A National Survey of Students at 140 Campuses
- ♦ Melvin Konner, Why the Reckless Survive
- Neil Postman, Virtual Students, Digital Classroom
- 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
- ♦ Northrop Frye, The Motive for Metaphor
- Katha Pollitt, Does a Literary Canon Matter?
- ♦ Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind
- ♦ Adrienne Rich, When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision
- Virginia Woolf, In Search of a Room of One’s Own
- ♦ John Updike, Little Lightnings
- John Updike, Moving Along
- Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics
- Susan Sontag, A Century of Cinema
- ♦ Susan Allen Toth, Going to the Movies
- Anthony Lane, The Sound of Music
- ♦ Terry Teachout, The Beatles Now
- Aaron Copland, How We Listen
- Prose Forms: Fables and Parables
- ♦ Aesop, The Frogs Desiring a King
- Plato, The Allegory of the Cave
- Jesus, Parables of the Kingdom
- Zen Parables
- ♦ Mark Twain, The War Prayer
- Philosophy and Religion
- Langston Hughes, Salvation
- Andre Aciman, In a Double Exile
- ♦ Rita Dove, The Epistle of Paul to the Ephesians
- ♦ Daniel C. Dennett, Common-Sense Religion
- ♦ Robert Graves, Mythology
- Henry David Thoreau, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
- ♦ Martha Nussbaum, The Idea of World Citizenship in Greek and Roman Antiquity
- Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth
- Annie Dillard, Sight into Insight
- Gilbert Highet, The Mystery of Zen
- Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism
- Genres index
- Rhetorical index
- Thematic index
Copyright © 2007, W. W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved.
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