"A Teachers & Writers Collaborative book."

Includes bibliographical references (p. [771]-777).

On noise ; Asthma ; Scipio's villa ; Slaves / Seneca -- Consolation to his wife / Plutarch -- Hateful things / Sei Shonagon -- Essays in idleness (selections) / Kenko -- Pleasure boat studio / Ou-Yang Hsiu -- Of books ; Of a monstrous child ; Of some verses on Virgil / Michel de Montaigne -- Of greatness / Abraham Cowley -- Nicolini and the lions ; An hour or two sacred to sorrow ; Twenty-four hours in London ; Love-letters / Addison & Steele -- The boarding house ; The solitude of the country / Samuel Johnson -- An essay on the noble science of self-justification / Maria Edgeworth -- New Year's Eve ; A chapter on ears ; Dream children : a reverie ; The superannuated man / Charles Lamb -- On going a journey ; On the pleasure of hating ; The fight / William Hazlitt -- The lantern-bearers ; An apology for idlers ; On marriage / Robert Louis Stevenson -- Going out for a walk ; Laughter / Max Beerbohm -- A piece of chalk ; On running after one's hat / G.K. Chesterton -- Street haunting ; The death of the moth / Virginia Woolf -- Such, such were the joys / George Orwell -- The execution of Tropmann / Ivan Turgenev -- This too is life ; Death / Lu Hsun -- In praise of shadows / Junichiro Tanizaki -- Unpacking my library ; Hashish in Marseilles / Walter Benjamin -- Blindness / Jorge Luis Borges -- Beside the nore ; Aunt Harriet / Hubert Butler -- Some blind alleys : a letter / E.M. Cioran -- Leaving the movie theater / Roland Barthes -- He and I / Natalia Ginzburg -- How I started to write / Carlos Fuentes -- Why do I fast? / Wole Soyinka -- Meatless days / Sara Suleri -- Walking / Henry David Thoreau -- On being an American / H.L. Mencken -- My face / Robert Benchley -- The secret life of James Thurber / James Thurber -- The crack-up / F. Scott Fitzgerald -- Once more to the lake ; The ring of time / E.B. White -- Once a tramp, always / M.F.K. Fisher -- My confession / Mary McCarthy -- For my brothers and sisters in the failure business / Seymour Krim -- Notes of a native son ; Alas, poor Richard / James Baldwin -- Some memories of the glorious bird and an earlier self / Gore Vidal -- Split at the root / Adrienne Rich -- The courage of turtles ; The threshold and the jolt of pain / Edward Hoagland -- An entrance to the woods / Wendell Berry -- Goodbye to all that ; In bed / Joan Didion -- Seeing / Annie Dillard -- The knife / Richard Selzer -- Against joie de vivre / Phillip Lopate -- Under the influence / Scott Russell Sanders -- Do he have your number, Mr. Jeffrey? / Gayle Pemberton -- Late Victorians / Richard Rodriguez.

"For more than four hundred years the personal essay has been one of the richest and most vibrant of all literary forms. The Art of the Personal Essay is the first anthology to celebrate this lively, fertile genre. Distinguished from the formal essay by its friendly, conversational tone, its drive toward candor and confession, and its often quirky first-person voice, the personal essay offers above all a feast of individuality."--BOOK JACKET.