Preface for instructors --
Part one: the first-person singular --
Writing for oneself : Anne Frank, Alice James, Henry David Thoreau, John Mack Faragher --
On keeping a notebook / Joan Didion --
Diary : at an artist's colony / Toi Derricotte --
On keeping a diary / William Safire --
Ambitions : Mario Puzo, Zora Neale Hurston, James Truslow Adams, Stephen Crane --
Learning to read and write / Frederick Douglass --
Gumption / Russell Baker --
Two kinds [story] / Amy Tan --
Moments of recognition : James Joyce, Michael Dorris, Arnold Van Gennep --
Shooting an elephant / George Orwell --
Salvation / Langston Hughes --
A & P [story] / John Updike --
Places in the heart : Edward Abbey, D.H. Lawrence, Eudora Welty --
Once more to the lake / E.B. White --
The solace of open spaces / Gretel Ehrlich --
Ringgold Street / David Bradley --
The power of names : William Shakespeare, Haig A. Bosmajian, Booker T. Washington, Lucien Levy-Bruhl --
"What's your name, girl?" / Maya Angelou --
Names / Mary McCarthy --
Seeing the elephant / Paul Gruchow --
Divided identities : Erik H. Erikson, Jan Clausen, Gloria Anzaldua --
Growing up Asian in America / Kesaya E. Noda --
Split at the root : an essay on Jewish identity / Adrienne Rich --
On being black and middle class / Shelby Steele --
Part two: the social fabric --
What is an American? : Ralph Waldo Emerson, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Ralph Ellison, Enrique Lopez --
What is an American? / J. Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur --
America : the multinational society / Ishmael Reed --
More than just a shrine : paying homage to the ghosts of Ellis island / Mary Gordon --
Bridging distances : Lewis Thomas, E.M. Forster, Cherrie Moraga, R.D. Laing --
Stranger in the village / James Baldwin --
Distancing the homeless / Jonathan Kozol --
Neither morons nor imbeciles nor idiots : in the company of the mentally retarded / Sallie Tisdale --
Affirmations of love : Michael Denneny, Rose Weitz, Sigmund Freud --
The madness and myths of homophobia / George Weinberg --
Territory [story] / David Leavitt --
Don't tell me you don't know [story] / Dorothy Allison --
Crises of adolescence : Margaret Mead, Gail Sheehy, Laurence Steinberg --
From Teenagers in crisis / David Elkind --
Shopping [story] / Joyce Carol Oates --
A national obsession : Neil Postman, Pauline Kael, Maurine Doerken, Daniel J. Boorstin --
TV addition / Marie Winn --
Crack and the box / Pete Hamill --
Family stories : Clyde Edgerton, Leslie Marmon Silko, William Kittredge, Alex Haley --
Stories make a family / Elizabeth Stone --
Casa: a partial remembrance of a Puerto Rican childhood / Judith Ortiz Cofer --
No name woman / Maxine Hong Kingston --
Granddaddy / Itabari Njeri --
Part three : everyday life --
Anxieties of appearance : Louis Harris, Nellie Wong, Arthur Schopenhauer --
Beauty : when the other dancer is the self / Alice Walker --
A few words about breasts / Nora Ephron --
At war with my skin / John Updike --
Public space : Jane Jacobs, Richard Sennett, Liu Binyan, Fran Lebowitz --
Territorial behavior / Desmond Morris --
Unfair game / Susan Jacoby --
Just walk on by : a black man ponders his power to alter public space / Brent Staples --
On holidays : Charles Dickens, Jeijun, Gwendolyn Brooks --
Happy New Year? / Russell Baker --
Ode to Thanksgiving / Michael Arlen --
On holidays and how to make them work / Nikki Giovanni --
Consumer culture : Thorstein Veblen, Sir Thomas More, Ellen Willis --
Kids in the mall : growing up controlled / William Severini Kowinski --
Shopping and other spiritual adventures in America today / Phyllis Rose --
The lesson [story] / Toni Cade Bambara --
The national pastime : Eve Babitz, Roger Angell, Elting E. Morison, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello --
Baseball : the ineffable national pastime / Gerald Early --
From father, with love / Doris Kearns Goodwin --
My baseball years / Philip Roth --
Part four : perspectives on gender --
The feminist movement today : Barbara Ehrenreich, Esther Ngan-Ling Chow, Rosario Morales, Audre Lorde --
Who says we haven't made a revolution? : a feminist takes stock / Vivian Gornick --
Feminisim: a transformational politic / bell hooks --
A letter to Matthew / Nancy Mairs --
Mothers : Marguerite Duras, Russell Baker, Marilyn French --
Ruth's song (because she could not sing it) / Gloria Steinem --
In search of our mothers' gardens / Alice Walker --
Mothers and sons / Barbara Lazear Ascher --
Fathers : Robert Frost, Mary-Lou Weisman, Alice Walker --
Discovery of a father / Sherwood Anderson --
Bridging [story] / Max Apple --
Fathering [story] / Bharati Mukherjee --
Gender roles and stereotypes : Germaine Greer, Janet Saltzman Chafetz, David M. Potter, Dorothy L. Sayers --
How the Americans understand the equality of the sexes / Alexis de Tocqueville --
The woman of the future / Thomas Edison --
Girl [story] / Jamaica Kincaid --
The wimp factor / Bruce Curtis --
Resistance to stereotyp
