Includes bibliographical references.

Cotton Mather, Of Poetry and Style (1726) -- Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (1741) -- Thomas Paine, Thoughts on the Present State of American Affairs (1776) -- Hector St. John De Crevecoeur, On the Situation, Feelings, and Thought of an American Farmer (1782) -- Benjamin Franklin, Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America (1784) -- Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist No. 1 (1787) -- Thomas Jefferson, Religion (1787) -- Judith Sargent Murray, On the Equality of the Sexes (1790) -- George Washington, Farewell Address (1796) -- Washington Irving, The Author's Account of Himself (1819) -- John James Audubon, The Passenger Pigeon (1835) -- Sarah Moore Grimke, On the Condition of Women in the United States (1837) -- Edgar Allan Poe, The Philosophy of Furniture (1840) -- Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fire-Worship (1843) -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Experience (1844) -- Margaret Fuller, from Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) -- Frederick Douglass, To My Old Master, Thomas Auld (1848) -- Herman Melville, Hawthorne and His Mosses (1850) -- Martin R. Delany, Comparative Condition of the Colored People of the United States (1852) -- Henry David Thoreau, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For (1854) -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, from The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858) -- Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address (1865) -- Fanny Fern, Delightful Men (1870) -- Walt Whitman, Death of Abraham Lincoln (1879) -- Henry James, The Art of Fiction (1884) -- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, On Advertising for Marriage (1885) -- Sui Sin Far, Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian (1890) -- Jane Addams, The Subjective Necessity of Social Settlements (1892) -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Solitude of Self (1892) -- John Muir, A Wind-Storm in the Forests (1894) -- Stephen Crane, The Mexican Lower Classes (1895) -- William Dean Howells, The Country Printer (1896) -- John Burroughs, The Art of Seeing Things (1899) -- William James, What Makes a Life Significant? (1900) -- W. E. B. Du Bois, Of Our Spiritual Strivings (1903) -- John Dewey, Democracy in Education (1903) -- Mary Austin, The Basket Maker (1903) -- Mark Twain, The Turning Point of My Life (1910) -- Randolph Bourne, The Handicapped (1911) -- John Jay Chapman, Coatesville (1912) -- Agnes Repplier, The Grocer's Cat (1912) -- George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy (1913) -- R. C. Holliday, An Article Without an Idea (1919) -- Dorothy Parker, Good Souls (1919) -- Finley Peter Dunne, The Prohibition Era (1920) -- Willa Cather, 148 Charles Street (1922) -- Theodore Dreiser, The City of My Dreams (1923) -- Christopher Morley, Intellectuals and Roughnecks (1923) -- H. L. Mencken, The Hills of Zion (1925) -- James Weldon Johnson, The Dilemma of the Negro Author (1928) -- Zora Neale Hurston, How It Feels to be Colored Me (1928) -- James Thurber, The Nature of the American Male: A Study of Pedestalism (1929) -- Albert Einstein, The World as I See It (1931) -- Kenneth Burke, The Status of Art (1931) -- F. Scott Fitzgerald, My Lost City (1932) -- Emma Goldman, Was My Life Worth Living? (1934) -- Katharine Fullerton Gerould, An Essay on Essays (1935) -- M. F. K. Fisher, Meals for Me (1937) -- Lewis Mumford, A New York Adolescence (1937) -- Edmund Wilson, John Jay Chapman (1938) -- William Saroyan, Fragments (1938) -- Clement Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch (1939) -- Gertrude Stein, What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There so Few of Them? (1940) -- M.F.K. Fisher, Meals for Me (1937) -- Edmund Wilson, John Jay Chapman (1938) -- William Saroyan, From Seven Fragments (1938) -- Clement Greenburg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch (1939) -- Eudora Welty, Ida M'Toy (1942) -- Hannah Arendt, We Refugees (1943) -- Mary McCarthy, America the Beautiful (1947) -- E. B. White, Death of a Pig (1947) -- James Baldwin, Equal in Paris (1955) -- Norman Mailer, The Homosexual Villain (1955) -- Rachel Carson, The Marginal World (1955) -- John Brinckerhoff Jackson, The Stranger's Path (1957) -- Paul Tillich, The Lost Dimension in Religion (1958) -- Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (1964) -- Joan Didion, Notes of a Native Daughter (1965) -- Martin Luther King, Jr., Beyond Vietnam (1967) -- Ralph Ellison, What America Would Be Like Without Blacks (1970) -- Loren Eiseley, The Brown Wasps (1971) -- Nora Ephron, A Few Words About Breasts (1972) -- Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell (1974) -- Annie Dillard, On Foot in Virginia's Roanoke Valley (1974) -- Adrienne Rich, Women and Honor; Some Notes on Lying (1975) -- Elizabeth Hardwick, Billie Holiday (1976) -- Edward Abbey, The Great American Desert (1977) -- William H. Gass, On Talking to Oneself (1979) -- Wallace Stegner, The Twilight of Self-Reliance (1980) -- Cynthia Ozick, A Drugstore in Winter (1982) -- Audre Lorde, The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House (1983) -- Rolando Hinojosa, This Writer's Sense of Place (1983) -- Nancy Mairs, On Being a Cripple (1986) -- Guy Davenport, On Reading (1987) -- N. Scott Momaday, The Native American Voice in American Literature (1988) -- Marilynne Robinson, Puritans and Prigs (1994) -- Jamaica Kincaid, In History (1997) -- Vivian Gornick, The Princess and the Pea (1997) -- David Foster Wallace, The View from Mrs. Thompson's (2001) -- Richard Rodriguez, Hispanic (2002) -- Wayne Koestenbaum, My 1980s (2003) -- Leonard Michaels, My Yiddish (2003) -- Zadie Smith, Speaking in Tongues (2008).

"A monumental, canon-defining anthology of four centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith. Many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves--sometimes critically--to American values, but even in those that don't, one can detect a subtext about being American. The Founding Fathers and early American writers self-consciously struggle to establish a recognizable national culture. The shining stars of the mid-nineteenth-century American Renaissance no longer lack confidence but face new reckonings with the oppression of blacks and women. The New World tradition of nature writing runs from Audubon and Thoreau and John Muir to Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard. Marginalized groups in all periods use the essay to assert or to complicate notions of identity. Lopate has cast his net intentionally wide, embracing critical, personal, political, philosophical, humorous, literary, polemical, and autobiographical essays, and making room for sermons, letters, speeches, and columns, dealing with a wide variety of subjects. Americans by birth as well as immigrants appear here, and famous essayists alongside writers more celebrated for fiction or poetry. The result is an extensive overview of the endless riches of the American essay"--