About the Book
Opening with a chapter on how to read an essay, this unique anthology of British and American prose spans the last hundred years of writing to give students not only an experience in the development of the essay form and its evaluation but also in the key historic issues and events that stirred through the last century. To emphasize the contexuality of the selections, each author is introduced by an unusually complete biographic headnote placing the author and work time. A chronological timeline is also provided. Questions following each selection compel students to evaluate the work they have read and to place it in relation to other, pertinent selections in the text. All selections have been thoroughly annotated to explain terms, people, events, and literary allusions that may not be familiar to the student reader. Not just a collection of excellent models of prose, Essays in Context forces students to confront the past, to analyse analysis critically, and to form their own judgment of events and reactions to them. The organization of the text is chronological, in keeping with its historic focus.
Table of Contents:
Thematic Table of Contents
Preface
Credits
Introduction
How to Read These Essays
Contextual Timeline
Mark Twain, "Corn-Pone Opinions" (1901)
G.K. Chesterton, " A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls" (1901)
W.E.B. Du Bois, "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others" (1903)
Max Beerbohm, "A Clergyman" (1918)
T.S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1920)
Walter Lippmann, "Stereotypes" (1922)
H.L. Mencken, "Bearers of the Torch" (1923); "The Penalty of Death" (1926)
Dorothy Parker, "Mrs. Post Enlarges on Etiquette" (1927)
Margaret Mead, "A Day in Samoa" (1928)
Robert Graves, "Triste La Guerre" (1929)
D.H. Lawrence, "The Real Trouble About Women" (1929)
James Thurber, "Which" (1929)
Robert Frost, "Education by Poetry" (1930)
George Orwell, "A Hanging" (1931)
Virginia Woolf, "Professions for Women" (1931)
James Thurber, "University Days" (1933)
Ludwig Lewisohn, "The Revolt Against Civilization" (1934)
Ernest Hemingway, "A Brush with Death" (1937)
Mollie Panter-Downes, "September 3, 1939"
E.M. Forster, "What I Believe" (1939)
Mollie Panter-Downes, "September 21, 1940"
Langston Hughes, "Salvation" (1940)
E.B. White, "Once More to the Lake" (1941)
Virginia Woolf, "The Death of the Moth" (1942)
Ralph Ellison, "The Way It Is" (1942)
Ernie Pyle, "The Death of Captain Waskow" (1944)
George Orwell, "What is Science?" (1945)
Winston Churchill, "The Iron Curtain" (1946)
George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language" (1946)
Zora Neale Hurston, "What White Publishers Won't Print" (1950)
William Faulkner, "Poetry and the Human Spirit" (1950)
James Baldwin, "Stranger in the Village" (1953)
Jacob Bronowski, "The Nature of Scientific Reasoning" (1956)
C.P. Snow, "The Two Cultures" (1956)
John Kenneth Galbraith, "Labor, Leisure, and the New Class" (1958)
X.J. Kennedy, "Who Killed King Kong" (1960)
Bruno Bettelheim, "A Victim" (1960)
Edward Hallett Carr, "The Historian and His Facts" (1961)
Rachel Carson, "The Obligation to Endure" (1962)
F.R. Leavis, "Two Cultures? The Significance of C.P. Snow" (1962)
Thomas S. Kuhn, "Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific Discoveries" (1962)
Martin Luther King, "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (1963); "I Have a Dream" (1963)
Malcolm X, "Message to the Grassroots" (1963)
Flannery O'Connor, "The Total Effect and the Eighth Grade" (1963)
Jessica Mitford, "Behind the Formaldehyde Curtain" (1963)
Martin Gansberg, "38 Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police" (1964)
Norman Podhoretz, "My Negro Problem--and Ours" (1964)
Loren Eiseley, "The Illusion of the Two Cultures" (1964)
Tom Wolfe, "The Peppermint Lounge Revisited" (1965)
Joan Didion, "On Going Home" (1967)
Martha Gellhorn, "Civilian Casualties in South Vietnam: August-September 1966" (1967)
Edward Hoagland, "The Draft Card Gesture" (1968)
Maya Angelou, "Graduation" (1969)
N. Scott Momaday, "The Way to Rainy Mountain" (1969)
Gore Vidal, "Drugs" (1970)
Judy Brady, "I Want a Wife" (1971)
Germaine Greer, "The Stereotype" (1971)
Russell Baker, "Work in Corporate America" (1972)
Clifford Geertz, "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" (1972)
Stanley Milgram, "The Perils of Obedience" (1974)
Maxine Hong Kingston, "No Name Woman" (1975)
Barbara Tuchman, "'This is the End of the World': The Black Death" (1978)
Frances FitzGerald, "Rewriting American History" (1979)
James Baldwin, "If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?" (1979)
Stephen Jay Gould, "Women's Brains" (1980)
Richard Rodriguez, "Labor" (1982)
Annie Dillard, "The Deer at Providencia" (1982)
Margaret Atwood, "Pornography" (1983)
Barry Lopez, "Landscape and Narrative" (1984)
Cynthia Ozick, "The Seam of the Snail" (1985)
Brent Staples, "Black Men and Public Space" (1986)
Nancy Mairs, "On Being a Scientific Booby" (1986)
Adrienne Rich, "Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity" (1986)
Stephen Jay Gould, "Streak of Streaks" (1988)
Jamaica Kincaid, from A Small Place (1988)
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Talking Black" (1988)
Paul Fussell, "The Real War 1939-1945" (1989)
Susan Sontag, "Aids and Its Metaphors" (1989)
Judith Ortiz Cofer, "Casa" (1989)
Neil Postman, "Learning by Story" (1989)
Woody Allen, "Random Reflections of a Second-Rate Mind" (1990)
Amy Tan, "The Language of Discretion" (1990)
John Preston, "Medfield, Massachusetts" (1991)
Robert Reich, "Why the Rich Are Getting Richer and the Poor, Poorer" (1991)
Gerald Early, "Their Malcolm, My Problem" (1992)
Stephanie Coontz, "A Nation of Welfare Families" (1992)
Martin Gardner, "The Great Samoan Hoax" (1993)
bell hooks, "Malcolm X: The Longed-for Feminist Manhood" (1994)
Leslie Marmon Silko, "Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit" (1996)
Francis Fukuyama, "The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order" (1999)
Index
