The Art of the Personal Essay

Cover
Half-Title
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Essays Arranged by Theme and Form
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I. Forerunners
	Seneca
		On Noise
		Asthma
		Scipio’s Villa
		Slaves
	Plutarch
		Consolation to His Wife
	Sei Shonagon
		Hateful Things
	Kenko
		Essays in Idleness [Selections]
	Ou-Yang Hsiu
		Pleasure Boat Studio
II. Fountainhead
	Michel de Montaigne
		Of Books
		Of a Monstrous Child
		On Some Verses of Virgil
III. The Rise of the English Essay
	Abraham Cowley
		Of Greatness
	Addison & Steele
		Nicolini and the Lions (Joseph Addison)
		An Hour or Two Sacred to Sorrow (Richard Steele)
		Twenty-four Hours in London (Richard Steele)
		Love-Letters (Richard Steele)
	Samuel Johnson
		The Boarding House
		The Solitude of the Country
	Maria Edgeworth
		An Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification
	Charles Lamb
		New Year’s Eve
		A Chapter on Ears
		Dream Children: A Reverie
		The Superannuated Man
	William Hazlitt
		On Going a Journey
		On the Pleasure of Hating
		The Fight
	Robert Louis Stevenson
		The Lantern-Bearers
		An Apology for Idlers
		On Marriage
	Max Beerbohm
		Going Out for a Walk
		Laughter
	G. K. Chesterton
		A Piece of Chalk
		On Running After One’s Hat
	Virginia Woolf
		Street Haunting
		The Death of the Moth
	George Orwell
		Such, Such Were the Joys . . .
IV. Other Cultures, Other Continents
	Ivan Turgenev
		The Execution of Tropmann
	Lu Hsun
		This Too Is Life
		Death
	Junichiro Tanizaki
		In Praise of Shadows
	Walter Benjamin
		Unpacking My Library
		Hashish in Marseilles
	Jorge Louis Borges
		Blindness
	Hubert Butler
		Beside the Nore
		Aunt Harriet
	E. M. Cioran
		Some Blind Alleys: A Letter
	Roland Barthes
		Leaving the Movie Theater
	Natalia Ginzburg
		He and I
	Carlos Fuentes
		How I Started to Write
	Wole Soyinka
		Why Do I Fast?
	Sara Suleri
		Meatless Days
V. The American Scene
	Henry David Thoreau
		Walking
	H. L. Mencken
		On Being an American
	Robert Benchley
		My Face
	James Thurber
		The Secret Life of James Thurber
	F. Scott Fitzgerald
		The Crack-Up
	E. B. White
		Once More to the Lake
		The Ring of Time
	M. F. K. Fisher
		Once a Tramp, Always . . .
	Mary McCarthy
		My Confession
	Seymour Kirm
		For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business
	James Baldwin
		Notes of a Native Son
		Alas, Poor Richard
	Gore Vidal
		Some Memories of the Glorious Bird and an Earlier Self
	Adrienne Rich
		Split at the Root
	Edward Hoagland
		The Courage of Turtles
		The Threshold and the Jolt of Pain
	Wendell Berry
		An Entrance to the Woods
	Joan Didion
		Goodbye to All That
		In Bed
	Annie Dillard
		Seeing
	Richard Selzer
		The Knife
	Philip Lopate
		Against Joie de Vivre
	Scott Russell Sanders
		Under the Influence
	Gayle Pemberton
		Do He Have Your Number, Mr. Jeffrey?
	Richard Rodriguez
		Late Victorians
Selected BibIiography