Fifty five unforgettable essays by the finest American writers of the twentieth century. Includes bibliographical notes (p. [569]-590). Corn-pone opinions / Mark Twain -- Of the coming of John / W.E.B. Du Bois -- A law of acceleration / Henry Adams -- Stickeen / John Muir -- The moral equivalent of war / William James -- The handicapped / Randolph Bourne -- Coatesville / John Jay Chapman -- The devil baby at Hull-house / Jane Addams -- Tradition and the individual talent / T.S. Eliot -- Pamplona in July / Ernest Hemingway -- The hills of Zion / H.L. Mencken -- How it feels to be colored me / Zora Neale Hurston -- The old stone house / Edmund Wilson -- What are master-pieces and why are there so few of them / Gertrude Stein -- The crack-up / F. Scott Fitzgerald -- Sex Ex Machina / James Thurber -- The ethics of living Jim Crow: an autobiographical sketch / Richard Wright -- Knoxville: Summer of 1915 / James Agee -- The figure a pãim makes / Robert Frost -- Once more to the lake / E.B. White -- Bop / Langston Hughes -- The future is now / Katherine Anne Porter -- Artists in uniform / Mary McCarthy -- The marginal world / Rachel Carson -- Notes of a native son / James Baldwin -- The brown wasps / Loren Eiseley -- A sweet devouring / Eudora Welty -- A hundred thousand straightened nails / Donald Hall -- Letter from Birmingham jail / Martin Luther King, Jr. -- Putting daddy on / Tom Wolfe -- Notes on "Camp" / Susan Sontag -- Perfect past / Vladimir Nabokov -- The apotheosis of Martin Luther King / Elizabeth Hardwick -- Illumination rounds / Michael Herr -- I know why the caged bird sings / Maya Angelou -- The lives of a cell / Lewis Thomas -- No name woman / Maxine Hong Kingston -- Looking for Zora / Alice Walker -- Women and honor: some notes on lying / Adrienne Rich -- Aria: a memoir of a bilingual childhood / Richard Rodriguez -- Okinawa: the bloodiest battle of all / W