Foreword / by Robert Atwan --
Introduction / by Joyce Carol Oates --
Corn-pone opinions / Mark Twain --
Of the coming of John / W.E.B. Du Bois --
Law of acceleration / Henry Adams --
Moral equivalent of war / William James --
Handicapped / Randolph Bourne --
Coatesville / John Jay Chapman --
Devil baby at Hull-house / Jane Addams --
Tradition and the individual talent / T.S. Eliot --
Pamplona in July / Ernest Hemingway --
Hills of Zion / H.L. Mencken --
How it feels to be colored me / Zora Neale Hurston --
Old stone house / Edmund Wilson --
What are master-pieces and why are there so few of them / Gertrude Stein --
Crack-up / F. Scott Fitzgerald --
Sex Ex Machina / James Thurber --
Ethics of living Jim Crow: an autobiographical sketch / Richard Wright --
Knoxville: Summer of 1915 / James Agee --
Figure a poem makes / Robert Frost --
Once more to the lake / E.B. White --
Insert flap "A" and throw away / S.J. Perelman --
Future is now / Katherine Anne Porter --
Artists in uniform / Mary McCarthy --
Marginal world / Rachel Carson --
Notes of a native son / James Baldwin --
Brown wasps / Loren Eiseley --
Sweet devouring / Eudora Welty --
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 --
Way to Rainy Mountain / N. Scott Momaday --
Apotheosis of Martin Luther King / Elizabeth Hardwick --
Illumination rounds / Michael Herr --
I know why the caged bird sings / Maya Angelou --
Lives of a cell / Lewis Thomas --
Search for Marvin Gardens / John McPhee --
Doomed in their sinking / William H. Gass --
No name woman / Maxine Hong Kingston --
Looking for Zora / Alice Walker --
Women and honor : some notes on lying / Adrienne Rich --
White album / Joan Didion --
Aria : a memoir of a bilingual childhood / Richard Rodriguez --
Solace of open spaces / Gretel Ehrlich --
Total eclipse / Annie Dillard --
Drugstore in winter / Cynthia Ozick --
Okinawa : the bloodiest battle of all / William Manchester --
Heaven and nature / Edward Hoagland --
Creation myths of Cooperstown / Stephen Jay Gould --
Life with daughters : watching the Miss America Pageant / Gerald Early --
Disposable rocket / John Updike --
They all just went away / Joyce Carol Oates --
Graven images / Saul Bellow --
Appendix: Notable twentieth-century American literary nonfiction.
