Modern American Prose: Fifteen Writers + 15

TABLE OF CONTENTS1. Introduction.2. James Baldwin, Autobiographical Notes, The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American, If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?, Notes of a Native Son. 3. Joan Didion, Marrying Absurd, The White Album, Miami, Salvador, Why I Write, On Keeping a Notebook. 4. Annie Dillard, Jest and Earnest, Living Like Weasels, Transfiguration, Skating, The Writing Life. 5. Loren Eiseley, The Long Loneliness, The Judgment of the Birds, The Dance of the Frogs, The Running Man. 6. Ellen Goodman, On Being a Journalist, The Company Man, It's Failure, Not Success, The Tapestry of Friendships, In the Male Direction. 7. Stephen Jay Gould, Prologue, Flaws in a Victorian Veil, Woman's Brains, Evolution as Fact and Theory. 8. Maxine Hong Kingston, No Name Woman, On Discovery, The Wild Man of the Green Swamp, Silence. 9. Barry Lopez, The Stone Horse, The Clamor of Justification, Children in the Woods, Perspective. 10. John McPhee, Los Angeles Against the Mountains, Pirates, Stowaways, Drugs, The Pineys, The Swiss at War. 11. Richard Selzer, The Pen and the Scalpel, The Knife, The Masked Marvel's Last Toehold, Imelda.12. Lewis Thomas, The Iks, The Lives of a Cell, The Tucson Zoo, To Err Is Human, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony. 13. Barbara Tuchman, In Search of History, The Idea and the Deed, The Black Death, Is History a Guide to the Future? 14. Alice Walker, Brothers and Sisters, Choice: A Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self,In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. 15. E.B. White, The Essayist, The Sea and the Wind That Blows, Death of a Pig, The Ring of Time, Once More to the Lake. 16. Tom Wolfe, Las Vegas, Only One Life, The Pump House Gang, The Right Stuff. 17. Other Voices: Wendel Berry, Feminism, the Body, and the Machine.Gretel Ehrlich, Friends, Foes, and Working Animals. Louise Erdrich, Forward to The Broken Cord. Mary Gordon, The Parable of the Cove; or, In Praise of Watercolors. Edward Hoagland, What I Think, What I Am. Zora Neale Hurston, How It Feels to Be Colored Me. Martin Luther King, Jr., I Have a Dream. Norman Mailer, The Siege of Chicago.Nancy Mairs, On Being a Cripple.Maile Meloy, The Voice of the Looking-glass.N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain.Joyce Carol Dates, Macho Time. Richard Rodriguez, Complexion.Philip Roth, Safe at Home.Susan Sontag, on AIDS.