The History of the Essay

Twenty-Two Books for Great Reading

• Michel de Montaigne, tr. Donald Frame, from The Complete Essays
• Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Tr. M.S. Peden, from Poems, Protest, and a Dream
• Yoshida Kenko, Essays on Idleness
• Charles Lamb, The Essays of Elia
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays
• Henry David Thoreau, Walden and “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience”
• George Orwell, Selected Essays
• Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays
• Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues
• Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
• William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain
• James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
• Roland Barthes, Mythologies
• Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
• Lewis Thomas, The Fragile Species
• Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk
• Richard Rodriguez, Brown
• Scott Russell Sanders, Hunting for Hope
• Dave Hickey, Air Guitar
• Albert Goldbarth, Many Circles
• David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster
• Lia Purpura, On Looking

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