50 Essays A Portable Anthology

Including both classic essays and contemporary readings, 50 Essays keeps you engaged as you improve on the writing abilities you need for academic success.

Samuel Cohen (PhD, City University of New York) is Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri. He is the author of After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s, co-editor (with Lee Konstantinou) of The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, Series Editor of The New American Canon: The Iowa Series in Contemporary Literature and Culture, and has published in such journals as Novel, Clio, Twentieth-Century Literature, The Journal of Basic Writing, and Dialogue: A Journal for Writing Specialists. For Bedford/St. Martin's, he is author of 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology and coauthor of Literature: The Human Experience.

NOTE: Sherman Alexie, "The Joy of Reading and Writing" is not available in the e-book by preference of the author.

Alternative Tables of Contents

　　　　By Rhetorical Mode

　　　　By Purpose

　　　　By Theme

　　　　By Clusters and Paired Readings

　　　　By Chronological Order

Introduction for Students: Active Reading,

Critical Thinking, and the Writing Process 　　　

*Chimamanda Adichie, To My One Love

Sherman Alexie, "The Joy of Reading and Writing" is not available in the e-book by preference of Sherman Alexie.

Superman and Me

Gloria Anzaldúa, How to Tame a Wild Tongue

Barbara Lazear Ascher, On Compassion

James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

*James Boswell, On War

William F. Buckley Jr., Why Don’t We Complain?

Alan Burdick, The Truth about Invasive Species

Nicholas Carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid?

*Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Paranoid Style of American Policing

Judith Ortiz Cofer, The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named María

*Daniel Defoe, The Education of Women

*Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook

Frederick Douglass, Learning to Read and Write

Brian Doyle, Joyas Voladores

Barbara Ehrenreich, Serving in Florida

Lars Eighner, On Dumpster Diving

Stephanie Ericsson, The Ways We Lie

Malcolm Gladwell, Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted

*Christina Henriquez, Lunch

Langston Hughes, Salvation

Zora Neale Hurston, How It Feels to Be Colored Me

Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence

*Camden Joy, Surviving Sinatra

Jamaica Kincaid, The Ugly Tourist

Stephen King, Reading to Write

Verlyn Klinkenborg, Our Vanishing Night

Audre Lorde, The Fourth of July

Nancy Mairs, On Being a Cripple

Malcolm X, Learning to Read

*John McPhee, The Search for Marvin Gardens

*Lydia Millet, Victor’s Hall

Bharati Mukherjee, Two Ways to Belong in America

George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant

Plato, The Allegory of the Cave

Richard Rodriguez, from Aria

Mike Rose, "I Just Wanna Be Average"

*Oliver Sacks, My Periodic Table

*David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

Brent Staples, Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Space

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Feet in Smoke

Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal

Amy Tan, Mother Tongue

Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

*James Thurber, The Subjunctive Mood

*Miya Tokumitsu, In the Name of Love

E. B. White, Once More to the Lake

*Colson Whitehead, The Loser Edit

*Virginia Woolf, Professions for Women

*Dave Zirin, Pre-Game

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