Foreword / by Robert Atwan -- Introduction / by Joyce Carol Oates -- Corn-pone opinions / Mark Twain -- Of the coming of John / W.E.B. Du Bois -- A law of acceleration / Henry Adams -- Stickeen / John Muir -- The moral equivalent of war / William James -- The handicapped / Randolph Bourne -- Coatesville / John Jay Chapman /The devil baby at Hull-house / Jane Addams -- Tradition and the individual talent / T.S. Eliot -- Pamplona in July / Ernest Henigway -- The hills of Zion / H.L. Mensken -- How it feels to be colored me / Zora Neale Hurston -- The old stone house / Edmund Wilson -- What are master-pieces and why are there so few of them / Gertrude Stein -- The crack-up / F. Scott Fitzgerald -- Sex Ex Machina / James Thurber -- The ethics of living Jim Crow: an autobiographical sketch / Richard Wright -- Knoxville: Summer of 1915 / James Agee -- The figure a poem makes / Robert Frost -- Once more to the lake / E.B. White -- Insert flap "A" and throw away / S.J. Perelman -- Bop / Langston Hughes -- The future is now / Katherine Anne Porter -- Artists in uniform / Mary McCarthy -- The marginal world / Rachel Carson -- Notes of a native son / James Baldwin -- The brown wasps / Loren Eiseley --

A sweet devouring / Eudora Welty -- A hundred thousand straightened nails / Donald Hall -- Letter from Brimingham jail / Martin Luther King Jr. -- Putting daddy on / Tom Wolfe -- Notes on "Camp" / Susan Sontag -- Perfect past / Vladimir Nabokov -- The way to Rainy Mountain / N. Scott Momaday -- The apotheosis of Martin Luther King / Elizabeth Hardwick -- Illumination rounds / Michael Herr246}0246}0I know why the caged bird sings / Maya Angelou -- The lives of a cell / Lewis Thomas -- The search for Marvin Gardens / John McPhee -- The doomed in their sinking / William H. Gass -- No name woman / Maxine Adrienne Rich -- The white album / Joan Didion -- Aria: a memoir of a bilingual childhood / Richard Rodriguez -- The solace of open spaces / Gretel Ehrlich -- Total eclipse / Annie Dillard -- A drugstore in winter / Cynthia Ozick -- Okinawa: the bloodiest battle of all / William Manchester -- Heaven and nature / Edward Hoagland -- The creation myths of Cooperstown / Stephen Jay Gould -- Life with daughters: watching the Miss America Pageant / Gerald Early -- The disposable rocket / John Updike -- They all just went away / Joyce Carol Oates -- Graven images / Saul Bellow -- Biographical notes --

Appendix: Notable twentieth-century American literary nonfiction.