12.The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American James Baldwin 1 It is a complex fate to be an American, Henry James observed, and the principal discovery an American writer makes in Europe is just how complex this fate is. Americas history, her a...
11.The Future of The English J . B. Priestley 1 To write about the English in standard and cosmopolitan political terms, the usual Left-Centre-Right stuff, is almost always wasting time and trouble. The English are different. The English are even mor...
10.The Sad Young Men Rod W. Horton and Herbert W. Edwards 1 No aspect of life in the Twenties has been more commented upon and sensationally romanticized than the so-called Revolt of the Younger Generation. The slightest mention of the decade brings...
9.The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas URSULA LE GUIN 1 WITH a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the stre...
8.The Worker as Creator or Machine Erich Fromm 1 Unless man exploits others, he has to work in order to live. However primitive and simple his method of work may be, by the very fact of production, he has risen above the animal kingdom; rightly has h...
7.The Libido for the Ugly H. L. Mencken 1 On a Winter day some years ago, coming out of Pittsburgh on one of the expresses of the Pennsylvania Railroad, I rolled eastward for an hour through the coal and steel towns of Westmoreland county. It was fam...
6.DISAPPEARING THR0UGH THE SKYLIGHT Osborne Bennet Hardison Jr. 1 Science is committed to the universal. A sign of this is that the more successful a science becomes, the broader the agreement about its basic concepts: there is not a separate Chinese...
5.Love is a Fallacy Max Shulman 1 Charles Lamb, as merry and enterprising a fellow as you will meet in a month of Sundays, unfettered the informal essay with his memorable Old China and Dream's Children. There follows an informal essay that ventures...
4.Inaugural Address (January 20, 1961) John F. Kennedy 1 We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom, symbolizing an end as well as a beginning, signifying renewal as well as change. For I have sworn before you and Almighty G...
3.Pub Talk and the King's English 1 Conversation is the most sociable of all human activities. And it is an activity only of humans. However intricate the ways in which animals communicate with each other, they do not indulge in anything that deserve...
