One Hundred Great Essays (Penguin Academic Series)

Robert DiYanni is Adjunct Professor of Humanities at New York University. Dr. DiYanni, who holds a B.A. from Rutgers University and a Ph.D. from the City University of New York, has taught English and Humanitiesat at a variety of institutions including NYU, CUNY, and Harvard. He has written and edited many books for college students of writing, literature, and humanities.

Gloria Anzaldúa, How to Tame a Wild Tongue

Francis Bacon, Of Studies

James Baldwin, If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me What Is

Dave Barry, Road Warrior

Roland Barthes, Toys

Hilaire Belloc, On Sacramental Things

Sven Birkerts, Into the Electronic Millennium

Judy Brady, I Want a Wife

Jacob Bronowski, The Nature of Scientific Reasoning 

Jane Brox, Influenza 1918

Angela Carter, The Wound in the Face

G. K.  Chesterton, The Fallacy of Success

Judith Oriz Cofer, Casa: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood

K. C Cole, Uncertainty

Bernard Cooper, Labyrinthine

Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

Annie Dillard, Living Like Weasels

John Donne, No Man is an Island

Mark Doty, Souls on Ice

Frederick Douglass, Learning to Read and Write

Brian Doyle, Joyas Voladoras

Andre Dubus, Lights of the Long Night

Barbara Ehrenreich, Family Values

Gretel Ehrlich, About Men

Loren Eiseley, The Flow of the River

Ralph Ellison, Living with Music

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

Richard Feynman, The Value of Science

Ben Franklin, Arriving at Perfection

Paul Fussell, Uniforms

Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point

Ellen Goodman, The Company Man

Mary Gordon, More Than Just a Shrine—Ellis Island

Stephen Jay Gould, Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of the Dinosaurs

Gordon Grice, The Black Widow

J. B. S. Haldane, On Being the Right Size

William Hazlitt, On the Pleasure of Hating

Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation

Michael Hogan, The Colonel

Barbara Holland, Naps

Langston Hughes, Salvation

Zora Neale Hurston, How It Feels to Be Colored Me

Pico Iyer, Nowhere Man

Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence

Samuel Johnson, The Decay of Friendship

Yoshida Kenko, Uncertainty

Jamaica Kincaid, On Seeing England for the First Time

Stephen King, Why We Crave Horror Movies

Barbara Kingsolver,Stone Soup

Maxine Hong Kingston, On Discovery

August Kleinzahler, The Dog, The Family: A Household Tale

Robin Topmach Lakoff, You Are What You Say

Charles Lamb, A Bachelor’s Complaint

D. H. Lawrence, On Ben Franklin’s Virtues

Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address

Niccolò Macchiavelli, The Morals of the Prince

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

John McPhee, Silk Parachute

Herman Melville, The Advocate

H.L. Mencken, Portrait of an Ideal World

Laura Miller, Cat People vs. Dog People

Horace Miner, Body Ritual Among the Nacirema

N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain

Michelle de Montaigne, Of Smells

Nuala O’Faolain, Are You Somebody?

George Orwell, Some Thoughts on the Common Toad

Cynthia Ozick, The Seam of the Snail

Plato, The Allegory of the Cave

Katherine Anne Porter, The Necessary Enemy

James Harvey Robinson, On Various Kinds of Thinking

Richard Rodriguez, Heading into Darkness Once Again

Scott Russell Sanders, The Men We Carry in Our Minds

Luc Sante, What Secrets Tell

Samuel H. Scudder, Look at Your Fish

David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

Richard Selzer, The Masked Marvel’s Last Toe-hold

G. B. Shaw, The Gospel of Andrew Undershaft

Leonard Shlain, Nonverbal/Verbal

Lee Siegel, The World Is All That Is the Case

Leslie Marmon Silko, Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination

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

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions

Brent Staples, Just Walk on By

Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal

Paul Theroux, On Being a Man

Lewis Thomas, Crickets, Cats, Bats, & Chaos

Henry David Thoreau, Why I Went to the Woods

Sojourner Truth, Ain’t I a Woman?

Mark Twain, Reading the Mississippi River

Alice Walker, Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self

David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster

Eudora Welty, Clamorous to Learn

E.B. White, Once More to the Lake

Terry Tempest Williams, A Shark in the Mind of One Contemplating Wilderness

E. O. Wilson, The Bird of Paradise: The Hunter and the Poet

Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff

Geoffrey Wolff, The Duke of Deception

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth

Fareed Zakaria,  The Rise of the Rest