The Norton Reader
An Anthology of Nonfiction
Personal Report
Chang-Rae Lee, Coming Home Again
Joan Didion, On Going Home
Andrea Barrett, A Hole in the Wall
Lars Eighner, On Dumpster Diving
Maya Angelou, Graduation
Richard Selzer, The Knife
Nancy Mairs, On Being a Cripple
Alice Walker, Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self
E. B. White, Once More to the Lake
Prose Forms: Journals
People, Places
Scott Russell Sanders, Under the Influence
Annie Dillard, from An American Childhood
Toni Morrison, Strangers
Jamaica Kincaid, Sowers and Reapers
Judith Ortiz Cofer, More Room
N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain
Margaret Atwood, True North
David Guterson, Enclosed. Encyclopedic. Endured: The Mall of America
Human Nature
Scott Russell Sanders, Looking at Women
Andrew Sullivan, What Is a Homosexual?
Anna Quindlen, Between the Sexes, a Great Divide
Lauren Slater, Love
E. S. Maduro, Excuse Me While I Explode: My Mother, Myself, My Anger
Amy Cunningham, Why Women Smile
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On the Fear of Death
Mary Roach, How to Know If You’re Dead
Cultural Critique
Anthony Burgess, Is America Falling Apart?
Jessica Mitford, Behind the Formaldehyde Curtain
Nicholas D. Kristof, Saudis in Bikinis
Fred Strebeigh, The Wheels of Freedom: Bicycles in China
John McMurty, Kill ‘Em! Crush ‘Em! Eat ‘Em Raw!
Bill McKibben, The Case for Single-Child Families
Brent Staples, Black Men and Public Space
Debra Dickerson, Who Shot Johnny?
Prose Forms: Op-Eds
Molly Ivins, Get a Knife, Get a Dog, but Get Rid of Guns
Brent Staples, Why Colleges Shower Their Students with A’s
David Brooks, The Gender Gap at School
Jennifer Britz, The Dean’s Daughter Gets Thin Envelope
Education
Frederick Douglass, Learning to Read
John Holt, How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading
Caroline Bird, College Is a Waste of Time and Money
William Zinsser, College Pressures
Adrienne Rich, Taking Women Students Seriously
William Golding, Thinking as a Hobby
Language and Communication
Gloria Naylor, “Mommy, What Does ‘Nigger’ Mean?”
Maxine Hong Kingston, Tongue-Tied
Richard Rodriguez, Aria
Gloria Anzaldúa, How to Tame a Wild Tongue
Marjorie Agosin, Always Living in Spanish
Garrison Keillor, How to Write a Letter and Postcards
Ben Franklin, Learning to Write
Patricia Williams, The Death of the Profane: The Rhetoric of Race and Rights
Anne Fadiman, The His’er Problem
Lewis Thomas, Notes on Punctuation
George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
An Album of Styles
Francis Bacon, Of Youth and Age
John Donne, No Man Is an Island
Samuel Johnson, The Pyramids
Mary Wollstonecraft, from A Vindication of the Rights of Women
John Henry Newman, Knowledge and Virtue
Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address
Ernest Hemingway, from A Farewell to Arms
Terry Tempest Williams, River Music
Nature and the Environment
Rachel Carson, Tides
John Muir, A Wind-Storm in the Forests
Edward Abbey, The Serpents of Paradise
Alexander Petrunkevitch, The Spider and the Wasp
Chief Seattle, Letter to President Pierce, 1855
Aldo Leopold, Marshland Elegy
Terry Tempest Williams, The Clan of One-Breasted Women
Ethics
Mark Twain, Advice to Youth
Jonathan Rauch, In Defense of Prejudice
Michael Levin, The Case for Torture
Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights
Michael Pollan, An Animal’s Place
Aldo Leopold, The Land Ethic
Mary Gordon, A Moral Choice
Sallie Tisdale, We Do Abortions Here: A Nurse’s Story
Paul Fussell, Thank God for the Atom Bomb
History
Henry David Thoreau, The Battle of the Ants
Barbara Tuchman, “This Is the End of the World”: The Black Death
Philip Alcabes, The Bioterrorism Scare: A Historical Perspective
Walt Whitman, Death of Abraham Lincoln
Hannah Arendt, Deportations from Western Europe
World War II: Victims, Villains, Heroes
- Matt Bai, He Said No to Internment
- Sara Corbett, Saved by Strangers
- Daniel Bergner, Chasing Evil
Politics and Government
George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant
Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Morals of the Prince
Thomas Jefferson and Others, The Declaration of Independence
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions
Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address
John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address
E. B. White, Democracy
Lani Guinier, Tyranny of the Majority
Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail
Prose Forms: Spoken Words
Al Gore, The Climate Emergency
William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Award Speech
Science and Technology
Jacob Bronowski, The Nature of Scientific Reasoning
Isaac Asimov, The Eureka Phenomenon
David Baltimore, Limiting Science: A Biologist’s Perspective
Henry Wechsler, Andrea Davenport, George Dowdall, Barbara Moeykens, and Sonia Castillo, Health and Behavioral Consequences of Binge Drinking in College: A National Survey of Students at 140 Campuses
Neil Postman, Virtual Students, Digital Classroom
Edward O. Wilson, Intelligent Evolution
Stephen Jay Gould, Darwin’s Middle Road
Literature, the Arts, and Media
Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings
Vladimir Nabokov, Good Readers and Good Writers
Katha Pollitt, Does a Literary Canon Matter?
Virginia Woolf, In Search of a Room of One’s Own
John Updike, Moving Along
Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics
Susan Sontag, A Century of Cinema
Anthony Lane, The Sound of Music
Aaron Copland, How We Listen
Prose Forms: Fables and Parables
Plato, The Allegory of the Cave
Jesus, Parables of the Kingdom
Zen Parables
Philosophy and Religion
Langston Hughes, Salvation
Andre Aciman, In a Double Exile
Henry David Thoreau, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth
Annie Dillard, Sight into Insight
Gilbert Highet, The Mystery of Zen
Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism
Genres index
Rhetorical index
Thematic index