Foreword / Robert Atwan -- Introduction / Joyce Carol Oates -- 1901: Corn-pone Opinions / Mark Twain -- 1903: Of the Coming of John / W.E.B. Du Bois -- 1906: A Law of Acceleration / Henry Adams -- 1909: Stickeen / John Muir -- 1910: The Moral Equivalent of War / William James -- 1911: The Handicapped / Randolph Bourne -- 1912: Coatesville / John Jay Chapman -- 1916: The Devil Baby at Hull-House / Jane Addams -- 1919: Tradition and the Individual Talent / T. S. Eliot -- 1923: Pamplona in July / Ernest Hemingway -- 1925: The Hills of Zion / H. L. Mencken -- 1928: How It Feels to Be Colored Me / Zora Neale Hurston -- 1933: The Old Stone House / Edmund Wilson -- 1935: What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them / Gertrude Stein -- 1936: The Crack-Up / F. Scott Fitzgerald -- 1937: Sex Ex Machina / James Thurber -- 1937: The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch / Richard Wright -- 1938: Knoxville: Summer of 1915 / James Agee -- 1939: The Figure a Poem Makes / Robert Frost -- 1941: Once More to the Lake / E. B. White -- 1944: Insert Flap "A" and Throw Away / S. J. Perelman -- 1949: Bop / Langston Hughes -- 1950: The Future Is Now / Katherine Anne Porter -- 1953: Artists in Uniform / Mary McCarthy -- 1955: The Marginal World / Rachel Carson -- 1955: Notes of a Native Son / James Baldwin -- 1956: The Brown Wasps / Loren Eiseley -- 1957: A Sweet Devouring / Eudora Welty -- 1961: A Hundred Thousand Straightened Nails / Donald Hall -- 1963: Letter from Birmingham Jail / Martin Luther King, Jr. -- 1964: Putting Daddy On / Tom Wolfe -- 1964: Notes on "Camp" / Susan Sontag -- 1966: Perfect Past / Vladimir Nabokov -- 1967: The Way to Rainy Mountain / N. Scott Momaday -- 1968: The Apotheosis of Martin Luther King / Elizabeth Hardwick -- 1969: Illumination Rounds / Michael Herr -- 1970: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings / Maya Angelou -- 1971: The Lives of a Cell / Lewis Thomas -- 1972: The Search for Marvin Gardens / John McPhee -- 1972: The Doomed in Their Sinking / William H. Gass -- 1975: No Name Woman / Maxine Hong Kingston -- 1975: Looking for Zora / Alice Walker -- 1977: Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying / Adrienne Rich -- 1979: The White Album / Joan Didion -- 1980: Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood / Richard Rodriguez -- 1981: The Solace of Open Spaces / Gretel Ehrlich -- 1982: Total Eclipse / Annie Dillard -- 1982: A Drugstore in Winter / Cynthia Ozick -- 1987: Okinawa: The Bloodiest Battle of All / William Manchester -- 1988: Heaven and Nature / Edward Hoagland -- 1989: The Creation Myths of Cooperstown / Stephen Jay Gould -- 1990: Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant / Gerald Early -- 1993: The Disposable Rocket / John Updike -- 1995: They All Just Went Away / Joyce Carol Oates -- 1997: Graven Images / Saul Bellow -- Appendix. Notable Twentieth-Century American Literary Nonfiction.

"This collection is a political, spiritual, and intensely personal record of America's tumultuous modern age by our foremost critics, commentators, activists, and artists. In her introduction to this volume, Joyce Carol Oates describes her project as "a search for the expression of personal experience within the historical, the individual talent within the tradition." Along with Robert Atwan, Oates has chosen a list of works that are both intimate and important, essays that take on subjects of profound and universal significance while retaining the power and spirit of a personal address." "This collection honors some of the twentieth century's best-known and best-loved writers on a breathtaking variety of topics. In a journalistic mode, Ernest Hemingway covers the bullfights in Pamplona, H. L. Mencken reacts to the Scopes trial, and Michael Herr dodges bullets in a helicopter over Vietnam. Nowhere is the intersection of our personal and political histories more meaningful than when the subject is America's enduring legacy of racial strife, as shown by Richard Wright's "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son," Zora Neale Hurston's "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," and others. The wonders and horrors of science, nature, and the cosmos are explored with eloquence, bravery, and beauty when Lewis Thomas writes about "The Lives of a Cell," Rachel Carson mulls "The Marginal World," and Stephen Jay Gould preaches evolution and baseball in "The Creation Myths of Cooperstown."" "Taken together, these essays fit, in the words of Joyce Carol Oates, "into a kind of mobile mosaic suggest[ing] where we've come from, and who we are, and where we are going." Book jacket."--BOOK JACKET.