About the Book
This exceptional anthology of British and American prose provides a chronological survey of over ninety of the most important and popular essays written in the twentieth century. Essays in Context acquaints students with the development and evaluation of the essay form while also introducing them to the key historical, cultural, social, and intellectual issues of the last century. The text is organized into eighteen themes to highlight the various patterns
of thought and feeling that developed throughout the century. Comprehensive biographic headnotes for the authors and a timeline of historic events help students to place the authors and their works in context.
Extensive discussion questions--organized under two headings, "Understanding and Analysis" and "Comparison"--follow each selection, motivating students to evaluate the work and relate it to other selections in the text. The volume also includes footnotes and an opening chapter on how to read essays. The selections have been thoroughly annotated to explain terms, people, events, and literary allusions. An ideal text for courses in composition and expository writing, Essays in Context
provides students with a framework for understanding and interrogating an extensive range of authors, from Mark Twain and T.S. Eliot to bell hooks and Leslie Marmon Silko.
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
Review :
"This is an altogether superlative selection of provocative and engaging writing by some of the best essayists in English. Teachers and students alike will learn from them."--M. Thomas Inge, Randolph-Macon College
"Well balanced anthology of twentieth-century essays presenting varied philosophies. Biographical information is excellent and unique in detail and accuracy. Highly appropriate for a program in twentieth-century views."--Ann Allred, Wilmington College
"The most solid reader (in its selections) that has come across my desk in the last two years. I especially like the reading strategies at the beginning of the text."--Elizabeth Rich, Saginaw Valley State University
"An excellent book with a variety of ethnic viewpoints and styles."--Joan Anderson, El Camino College
"A very useful compilation for my students of advanced writing."--John D. Nazelrod, University of Baltimore
