Preface for instructors --
Part one: the first-person singular --
Writing for oneself : Anne Frank, Alice James, Henry David Thoreau, John Mack Faragher --
On keeping a notebook / Joan Didion --
Diary : at an artist's colony / Toi Derricotte --
On keeping a diary / William Safire --
Ambitions : Mario Puzo, Zora Neale Hurston, James Truslow Adams, Stephen Crane --
Learning to read and write / Frederick Douglass --
Gumption / Russell Baker --
Two kinds [story] / Amy Tan --
Moments of recognition : James Joyce, Michael Dorris, Arnold Van Gennep --
Shooting an elephant / George Orwell --
Salvation / Langston Hughes --
A & P [story] / John Updike --
Places in the heart : Edward Abbey, D.H. Lawrence, Eudora Welty --
Once more to the lake / E.B. White --
The solace of open spaces / Gretel Ehrlich --
Ringgold Street / David Bradley --
The power of names : William Shakespeare, Haig A. Bosmajian, Booker T. Washington, Lucien Levy-Bruhl --
"What's your name, girl?" / Maya Angelou --
Names / Mary McCarthy --
Seeing the elephant / Paul Gruchow --
Divided identities : Erik H. Erikson, Jan Clausen, Gloria Anzaldua --
Growing up Asian in America / Kesaya E. Noda --
Split at the root : an essay on Jewish identity / Adrienne Rich --
On being black and middle class / Shelby Steele --
Part two: the social fabric --
What is an American? : Ralph Waldo Emerson, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Ralph Ellison, Enrique Lopez --
What is an American? / J. Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur --
America : the multinational society / Ishmael Reed --
More than just a shrine : paying homage to the ghosts of Ellis island / Mary Gordon --
Bridging distances : Lewis Thomas, E.M. Forster, Cherrie Moraga, R.D. Laing --
Stranger in the village / James Baldwin --
Distancing the homeless / Jonathan Kozol --
Neither morons nor imbeciles nor idiots : in the company of the mentally retarded / Sallie Tisdale --
Affirmations of love : Michael Denneny, Rose Weitz, Sigmund Freud --
The madness and myths of homophobia / George Weinberg --
Territory [story] / David Leavitt --
Don't tell me you don't know [story] / Dorothy Allison --
Crises of adolescence : Margaret Mead, Gail Sheehy, Laurence Steinberg --
From Teenagers in crisis / David Elkind --
Shopping [story] / Joyce Carol Oates --
A national obsession : Neil Postman, Pauline Kael, Maurine Doerken, Daniel J. Boorstin --
TV addition / Marie Winn --
Crack and the box / Pete Hamill --
Family stories : Clyde Edgerton, Leslie Marmon Silko, William Kittredge, Alex Haley --
Stories make a family / Elizabeth Stone --
Casa: a partial remembrance of a Puerto Rican childhood / Judith Ortiz Cofer --
No name woman / Maxine Hong Kingston --
Granddaddy / Itabari Njeri --
Part three : everyday life --
Anxieties of appearance : Louis Harris, Nellie Wong, Arthur Schopenhauer --
Beauty : when the other dancer is the self / Alice Walker --
A few words about breasts / Nora Ephron --
At war with my skin / John Updike --
Public space : Jane Jacobs, Richard Sennett, Liu Binyan, Fran Lebowitz --
Territorial behavior / Desmond Morris --
Unfair game / Susan Jacoby --
Just walk on by : a black man ponders his power to alter public space / Brent Staples --
On holidays : Charles Dickens, Jeijun, Gwendolyn Brooks --
Happy New Year? / Russell Baker --
Ode to Thanksgiving / Michael Arlen --
On holidays and how to make them work / Nikki Giovanni --
Consumer culture : Thorstein Veblen, Sir Thomas More, Ellen Willis --
Kids in the mall : growing up controlled / William Severini Kowinski --
Shopping and other spiritual adventures in America today / Phyllis Rose --
The lesson [story] / Toni Cade Bambara --
The national pastime : Eve Babitz, Roger Angell, Elting E. Morison, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello --
Baseball : the ineffable national pastime / Gerald Early --
From father, with love / Doris Kearns Goodwin --
My baseball years / Philip Roth --
Part four : perspectives on gender --
The feminist movement today : Barbara Ehrenreich, Esther Ngan-Ling Chow, Rosario Morales, Audre Lorde --
Who says we haven't made a revolution? : a feminist takes stock / Vivian Gornick --
Feminisim: a transformational politic / bell hooks --
A letter to Matthew / Nancy Mairs --
Mothers : Marguerite Duras, Russell Baker, Marilyn French --
Ruth's song (because she could not sing it) / Gloria Steinem --
In search of our mothers' gardens / Alice Walker --
Mothers and sons / Barbara Lazear Ascher --
Fathers : Robert Frost, Mary-Lou Weisman, Alice Walker --
Discovery of a father / Sherwood Anderson --
Bridging [story] / Max Apple --
Fathering [story] / Bharati Mukherjee --
Gender roles and stereotypes : Germaine Greer, Janet Saltzman Chafetz, David M. Potter, Dorothy L. Sayers --
How the Americans understand the equality of the sexes / Alexis de Tocqueville --
The woman of the future / Thomas Edison --
Girl [story] / Jamaica Kincaid --
The wimp factor / Bruce Curtis --
Resistance to stereotypes : Rita Mae Brown, Frances Dana Barker Gage, Paul Theroux --
Thoughts on peace in an air raid / Virginia Woolf --
I want a wife / Judy Brady --
Mr. President / Bob Greene --
Conflicting loyalties : Olga Silverstein, Vivian Gornick, Terry Allen Kupers --
Waiting for a taxi / June Jordan --
Where I come from is like this / Paula Gunn Allen --
The men we carry in our minds / Scott Russell Sanders --
Part five : enduring issues --
Declarations of independence : John Locke, Barbara C. Jordan, Mary Wollstonecraft --
The declaration of independence / Thomas Jefferson --
Declaration of independence of the democratioc republic of Viet-Nam / Ho Chi Minh --
Declaration of sentiments and resolutions / Elizabeth Cady Stanton --
I have a dream / Martin Luther King, Jr. --
The debate on abortion : Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, Anna Quindlen, Ernest Hemingway, Florynce C. Kennedy --
A defense of abortion / Judith Jarvis Thomson --
What I saw at the abortion / Richard Selzer --
Putting women back into the abortion debate / Ellen Willis --
Freedom of expression : Michel de Montaigne, Carl L. Becker, Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor --
The indispensable opposition / Walter Lippmann --
2 live crew, decoded / Henry Louis Gates, Jr. --
Let's put pornography back in the closet / Susan Brownmiller --
Denigrating the species / H.L. Mencken, Taylor Caldwell, Thomas Hobbes --
A modest proposal / Jonathan Swift --
Confession of faith / Fyodor Dostoyevsky --
The damned human race / Mark Twain --
Visions of the land : Heinmot Tooyalaket (Chief Joseph), Noel Perrin, Brigid Brophy --
From The Maine woods / Henry David Thoreau --
The journey's end / Wendell Berry --
A first American views his land / N. Scott Momaday --
Environmental action : Joy Williams, Aldo Leopold, J.E. Lovelock --
Natural man / Lewis Thomas --
Ecofeminism : our roots and flowering / Charlene Spretnak --
Women, home, and community : the struggle in an urban environment --
Part six : the power of language --
The languages of home : Barbara Mellix, Richard Rodriguez, An-Thu Quang Nguyen, Edmund Wilson --
The language of home / John Edgar Wideman --
From the poets in the kitchen / Paule Marshall --
From A song for a barbarian reed pipe / Maxine Hong Kingston --
The loudest voice [story] / Grace Paley --
Bilingualism : Tina Bakka, S.I. Hayakawa, Oscar Hijuelos --
Toward an American language / Richard Rodriguez --
Viva bilingualism / James Fallows --
Language and politics : Walt Whitman, Randall Jarrell, James Baldwin --
Politics and the English language / George Orwell --
Words on words / Vaclav Havel --
Nobody mean more to me than you and the future life of Willie Jordan / June Jordan --
The power of metaphor : Aristotle, Jacob Bronowski, Cynthia Ozick, Judy Ruiz --
From Metaphors we live by / George Lakoff and Mark Johnson --
From AIDS and its metaphors / Susan Sontag --
Fighting words : Barbara Lawrence, Charles R. Lawrence, E. Digby Baltzell --
Words with built-in judgments / S.I. Hayakawa --
A question of language / Gloria Naylor --
The WASP sting / Anne Roiphe --
Part seven : the pleasures of the mind --
Sight into insight : Helen Keller, Werner Heisenberg, Richard Hoggart --
Seeing / Annie Dillard --
The stone horse / Barry Lopez --
The loss of the creature / Walker Percy --
The unexpected universe : Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Carl Sandburg --
Sex, drugs, disasters, and the extinction of dinosaurs / Stephen Jay Gould --
The star thrower / Loren Eiseley --
Much ado about nothing / K.C. Cole --
Understanding horror : Stephen King, William James, Richard Wright --
Tell-tale Heart [story] / Edgar Allan Poe --
In pursuit of pure horror / Harper's Magazine --
Origins : Robert Graves, Barbara C. Sproul, Isaac Bashevis Singer --
From Symposium / Plato --
Chapters one, two, and three / Genesis --
The time when there were no people on the earth plain / Bering Strait Eskimo creation myth --
The search for truth : Blaise Pascal, Friedrich Nietzsche, Woody Allen --
Idols of the mind / Francis Bacon --
Stripping the mind of its beliefs / Rene Descartes --
Emptiness / Shunryu Suzuki --
Why we write : George Orwell, Toni Cade Bambara, Annie Dillard --
Why it write / Joan Didion / Nurturing resistance / Bernice Johnson Reagon --
I write for revenge against reality / Francine du Plessiz Gray --
B. Traven is alive and well in Cuernavaca [story] / Rudolfo A. Anaya --
The act of reading : Malcolm X, Henry David Thoreau, Vladimir Nabokov, Edna Buchanan --
From Black boy / Richard Wright --
A sweet devouring / Eudora Welty --
Four kinds of reading / Donald Hall --
The art of reading / Lin Yutang --
The writers.