Essays & Speeches

... Read 101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think Summary

This study guide references the 1990 Oxford University Press edition of James M. McPherson’s Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution. The book is a collection of seven essays originally delivered as lectures, all on the 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, and his role in the Civil War (1861-1865). The book calls the Civil War era the “Second American Revolution” because, with Lincoln’s help, it brought about a fundamental transformation in the... Read Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution Summary

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Plato’s Republic takes the form of a series of dialogues between the first-person narrator (Socrates, Plato's teacher) and various real-life figures. “The Allegory of the Cave,” perhaps the most well-known section of The Republic, takes place as a conversation between Socrates and Plato’s brother, Glaucon. In this section, Socrates attempts to illustrate a point about how one can gain knowledge and wisdom and “perceive [...] the Essential Form of Goodness” (paragraph 31, line 10), via... Read Allegory Of The Cave Summary

In his compilation of essays, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, Robert Fulghum studies the simplicity embedded in everyday experiences. First published in 1989, this collection captivated a global audience, becoming a cultural touchstone as a #1 New York Times bestseller and selling over 7 million copies. Fulghum draws from his life experiences to craft this collection of essays. This collection, which falls within the self-help, motivational, and personal transformation genres... Read All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten Summary

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Anzia Yezierska introduces her immigration story by outlining why she came to America—to find hope, romance, and freedom to express herself. When she arrives, she says her body is strong and her “heart and soul pregnant with the unlived lives of generations clamoring for expression” (Paragraph 4). This is not to be, at least immediately. She needs money but cannot find work in factories, so her only options are to work in a kitchen or... Read America and I Summary

Zitkála-Šá’s 1921 book American Indian Stories gathers autobiographical chapters, historical fiction stories, and essays focused on the experiences of the Dakota Sioux and interactions between American Indians and White citizens of the United States. Zitkála-Šá’s works convey a strong sense of independence, pride in Sioux culture, and indignation at injustices committed against American Indians. This study guide references the 2019 Modern Library (Penguin Random House) edition of American Indian Stories.SummaryThe collection begins with an autobiographical... Read American Indian Stories Summary

American Like Me: Reflections on Life Between Cultures (2018) is an essay collection edited by actress and activist America Ferrera with E. Cayce Dumont. The collection contains essays from notable individuals in movie and TV entertainment, food, publishing, public service, comedy, music, and self-help content creation. These first-person accounts all address the often troublesome question of what it means to be American, especially when growing up between different cultures. American Like Me is a New... Read American Like Me Summary

Elbert Hubbard’s essay “A Message to Garcia” tells of the heroic journey of an Army soldier who must deliver a letter to a freedom fighter, and of the need for a similar spirit of determination in the workplace. The work first appeared as a magazine article in 1899 and became a pamphlet and book that reached millions of readers. “Carry a message to Garcia” (3) was a commonly used phrase in America during the first... Read A Message to Garcia Summary

... Read A Mind Spread Out on the Ground Summary

“A Modell of Christian Charity” is a sermon written by John Winthrop, a Puritan lawyer who served as the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, an English colonial settlement around present-day Boston, and the second settlement in New England. A sermon is a speech on a religious subject, usually used for those delivered by clergy in Christian church services. The sermon’s epigraph (a short, introductory quotation or informational text) tells us Winthrop wrote on... Read A Model of Christian Charity Summary

A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick is a satirical essay published anonymously in 1729 by Irish author Jonathan Swift. Using irony and hyperbole, the essay mocks heartless attitudes toward the poor among English and Irish elites by proposing that impoverished families sell their infant children to be killed and eaten by the rich. One... Read A Modest Proposal Summary

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard wrote the autobiographical memoir An American Childhood (1987). In this memoir, Dillard (born in 1945) describes her intellectual development, from her first true intellectual awakening, at 5 years old, through her busy and happy pre-teen years and her turbulent adolescence, to her acceptance at a prestigious private college at age 18. An exploration of her childhood during the 1950s, this memoir operates as a coming-of-age story in which the author... Read An American Childhood Summary

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An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke is a study of how humans think, learn, and retain knowledge. Scholars often focus first on Locke’s philosophical treatises, but his work on epistemology complements and shapes his political thought. Born in 1632, the English philosopher ushered in the Age of Enlightenment and is considered one of the greatest Western philosophers in history. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, first published in 1690, explores the origin and nature... Read An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Summary

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An Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Malthus was first published anonymously in 1798. Its core argument, that human population will inevitably outgrow its capacity to produce food, widely influenced the field of early 19th century economics and social science. Immediately after its first printing, Malthus’s essay garnered significant attention from his contemporaries, and he soon felt the need to reveal his identity. Although it was highly controversial, An Essay on the Principle... Read An Essay on the Principle of Population Summary

Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster is a 2009 non-fiction book that examines the behavior of people amid and after disasters as well as the institutional failure that can worsen disasters. Solnit explores five major disasters and detours to discuss several others while providing commentary on contemporary Western culture, anarchism, and the media’s portrayal of disaster victims.Solnit and the many sociologists she cites present an optimistic view... Read A Paradise Built in Hell Summary

... Read A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful Summary

As an epigram, Milton quotes Euripides, who wrote: “This is true liberty, when free-born men, having the advise the public, may speak free, which he who can, and will, deserves high praise; who neither can, nor will, may hold his peace; what can be juster in a state than this?” (337). Milton explains that addressing Parliament in the name of the “public good” (337) is no small feat and that any person in this position... Read Areopagitica Summary

A Sand County Almanac is a 1949 nonfiction book by the American naturalist and writer Aldo Leopold. The book is structured as a series of essays, beginning with Leopold’s description of a year on his farm and progressing to a series of essays on humanity’s relationship with nature, culminating in an argument for an ethical approach to the land. Published by Oxford University Press a year after Leopold’s death, the book is credited with having... Read A Sand County Almanac Summary

A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid is a work of creative nonfiction originally published in 1988. Kincaid shares memories of her home country, Antigua, both while it was under colonial rule and self-governance. She illustrates how life has and hasn’t changed for Antiguan citizens because of government corruption, the legacies of slavery, and the preoccupation with tourism over public welfare. Though the book won no awards, Kincaid has won a plethora of awards for her... Read A Small Place Summary

Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster is considered a seminal work of literary criticism that demystifies the form of the novel as it was understood in the early 20th century. The book is adapted from a series of informal lectures Forster delivered in 1927 at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. Forster was an accomplished novelist as well as a critic, known for the novels Howard’s End and Passage to India, among others... Read Aspects of the Novel Summary

... Read A Swim in a Pond in the Rain Summary

Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels, A Modest Proposal) wrote A Tale of a Tub (published in 1704) not only to expound upon the hypocrisy of religion in early 18th century England, but to explore ideas about critics, oration, ancient and modern philosophies, digressions, and the nature of writing itself. These themes are all underscored with a satirical tone that takes religion, authors, and critics to task. The title refers to the tub that sailors used to... Read A Tale Of A Tub Summary

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects was written in 1792 by Mary Wollstonecraft. It is often referred to as one of the earliest feminist texts, and Wollstonecraft herself described it as proto-feminist. In it, Wollstonecraft explores the oppression of women by men, and argues that no society can be either virtuous or moral while half of the population are being subjugated by the other half. Ultimately, Wollstonecraft... Read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Summary

Bad Feminist is a collection of essays from writer, scholar, and social critic Roxane Gay. Published in 2014 by Harper Perennial, the New York Times best seller draws together an array of topics, from pop culture to literary discourse to political legislation to personal recollections, in an analysis of society, culture, and politics. Gay tackles modern patriarchy and racism in ways that emphasize the humanity of marginalized people and how those systems of oppression deny... Read Bad Feminist Summary

“Becoming a Learner: Realizing the Opportunity of Education,” Second Edition (2018) is an essay by Matthew L Sanders, who wrote it with incoming college freshman in mind. Its goal is to change the perspective that higher education prepares students for a profitable career. Instead, it teaches students to become learners.In the Introduction, Sanders writes: “The hardest thing for you to know is the thing you think you already know” (xi). Many people think they know... Read Becoming a Learner Summary

Harvard-educated Dr. Atul Gawande is a staff writer for The New Yorker, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and founder of two nonprofits aimed at innovating surgical practices around the world. He wrote Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance to explore the attributes that make a good doctor. Published in 2007 as a follow-up to his 2002 National Book Award Finalist Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science, Better explores “how situations of... Read Better Summary

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s nonfiction book Between the World and Me was published 2015. The book takes the form of a long letter to Coates’s son Samori at age 15, and the title borrows from a poem by famed Black author Richard Wright. The text focuses on the psychological and physical trauma of racial violence that haunts generations of Black people, considering themes like The Precarity of the Black Body in the United States, The Danger of... Read Between the World and Me Summary

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The Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge published Biographia Literaria, his semiautobiographical work on aesthetic theory, in 1817. Charting the history of his literary career and melding amusing autobiographical anecdotes with what Coleridge calls “transcendental philosophy” (91), the text is an influential work of literary criticism. Capturing Coleridge’s political ideas about the French Revolution and the American Declaration of Independence, the work is also an important historical document. In its pages, Coleridge uses 19th-century philosophical ideas... Read Biographia Literaria Summary

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott was originally published in 1994. Many of Lamott’s books have been on the New York Times bestsellers list, which qualifies her to offer advice about how to write. She also taught at writing conferences and at UC Davis, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was inducted into the California Hall of Fame. Bird by Bird is a combination of memoir, self-help book, and writing... Read Bird By Bird Summary

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Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa presents the US-Mexico border as a space ripe for sociocultural, psychological, and historical deconstruction. Speaking from her own experiences growing up in South Texas, Anzaldúa redefines the boundaries between practice and theory, personal history and cultural critique, poetry and prose. Writing in both Spanish and English (and omitting translations at times), Anzaldúa writes as a Chicana woman, in the Chicano language, envisioning a new consciousness borne out... Read Borderlands La Frontera Summary

Written in 2013, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants is a nonfiction book by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. The work examines modern botany and environmentalism through the lens of the traditions and cultures of the Indigenous peoples of North America. Through a series of personal reflections, the author explores the connection between living things and human efforts to cultivate a more sustainable... Read Braiding Sweetgrass Summary

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Callings: The Purpose and Passion of Work, written by Dave Isay with Maya Millett and published in 2016, is a collection of brief, first-person narratives about the value and meaning of work. These stories were collected through the oral history project of StoryCorps, a nonprofit organization that records, archives, and shares stories of life in America. StoryCorps and its founder and president, Dave Isay, have received many grants and awards for the organization’s work, including... Read Callings: The Purpose and Passion of Work Summary

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Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric is a genre-bending meditation on race, racism, and citizenship in 21st-century America. Published in 2014, Citizen combines prose, poetry, and images to paint a provocative portrait of the African American experience and racism in the so-called “post-racial” United States. Claudia Rankine is an essayist, poet, playwright and the editor of several anthologies; she is currently the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University. Citizen is the winner of... Read Citizen: An American Lyric Summary

Henry David Thoreau’s “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” more commonly known as “Civil Disobedience,” originated as a Concord Lyceum lecture given in January 1848 as the Mexican-American War was winding down. The essay and its central thesis—that following one’s conscience trumps the need to follow the law—have profoundly impacted global history, political philosophy, and American thought, notably influencing both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.The text was originally published in an 1849 essay... Read Civil Disobedience Summary

The all-time best-selling published work in American history, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense helped ignite a revolution that changed the world. Released in January 1776, the pamphlet condemned the arbitrary rule of Britain’s King George III and his Parliament, and it urged colonists to rise up against their oppressors and replace colonial rule with a democratic republic of free and equal citizens. Common Sense helped inspire rebel leaders to declare American independence six months later.An e-book... Read Common Sense Summary

Atul Gawande’s Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science is a collection of essays that weaves narratives from Gawande’s personal experience as a surgical resident together with research, philosophy, and case studies in medicine. Published in 2002, Complications became a 2002 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction. Gawande, a Rhodes Scholar and MacArthur Fellow, is a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at... Read Complications Summary

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Culture and Imperialism is a nonfiction book published in 1993 by the Palestinian American author and academic Edward Said. Originating from a series of lectures that Said delivered in 1985 and 1986, Culture and Imperialism is an expansion of the ideas set out in his groundbreaking earlier work, Orientalism. Considered one of the founders of the field of post-colonial studies, Said looks at how the formerly colonized margins influence the metropolitan centers, and vice versa... Read Culture and Imperialism Summary

... Read Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions Summary

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Discourse on Colonialism is an essay written originally in French by Aimé Césaire and published in 1950. This seminal work by Césaire opens with a thesis that Europe currently suffers from two problems. The first problem is the state of the proletariat and colonialism and the second is its moral hypocrisy. Throughout the essay, Césaire elaborates on this thesis by identifying the proletariat as the colonized laborer and the bourgeois as the European academic, scholar... Read Discourse on Colonialism Summary

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The philosopher Socrates and a man named Euthyphro meet at the court of a magistrate in charge of religious law. They discover that they both have cases to plead there. Socrates explains that he has been accused by a young man named Meletus of corrupting the youth of Athens by questioning the traditional beliefs about the gods and introducing new gods. Euthyphro says that he, too, has received similar accusations before, and that the thing... Read Euthyphro Summary

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In “Existentialism is a Humanism” (1945), French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre attempts to convince an audience of philosophers and laypeople alike that his philosophy is neither pessimistic, nor relativist, nor quietist, nor subjectivist in the sense of presenting human beings as isolated individuals. He begins by elaborating Christians’ and Marxists’ criticisms of his ideas, then attempts to respond to each. In doing so, he focuses on the key formulation of existentialism, “existence precedes essence.” Then... Read Existentialism is a Humanism Summary

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... Read Famine, Affluence, and Morality Summary

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“Flying Home” is the titular story of Ralph Ellison’s collection published in 1944. It tells the story of Todd, a Black Air Force candidate in flight training school in Macon County, Alabama, during World War II. As one of the first Black people accepted into the school, Todd is determined to prove that his capabilities are equal to those of his white counterparts. The story addresses themes of Fear of Judgment, Opportunities and the American... Read Flying Home Summary

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Gift from the Sea is a 1955 work of inspirational nonfiction literature by American author Anne Morrow Lindbergh. While vacationing on Captiva Island, Florida, Lindbergh explores the questions of how to find a new, more natural rhythm of life and how to gain a deeper relationship with herself and others. To gain inspiration for this, she discusses various shells that she finds on the beach. The first two shells she finds symbolize the importance of... Read Gift From The Sea Summary

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Heavy is Kiese Laymon’s 2018 memoir. It won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the LA Times Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose. Earning praise from Alice Walker, The Boston Globe, NPR, Time, and The Paris Review, Heavy acknowledges that “we’ve arrived at the point we have as a country in part because of lies we’ve told ourselves about what America means” (Abdurraquib, Hanif. “Heavy.” 4 Columns, 2018).This guide refers to the... Read Heavy Summary

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Jeanne Marie Laskas’s Hidden America: From Coal Miners to Cowboys, an Extraordinary Exploration of the Unseen People Who Make This Country Work was published in 2012 to rave reviews and was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as a “Must-Read Best Books.” Laskas is an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh and has written a wide variety of best-selling nonfiction texts. In Hidden America, Laskas explores the way ordinary Americans live by getting to know her... Read Hidden America Summary

High Tide in Tucson is a series of essays by heralded American novelist Barbara Kingsolver, collected and published in 1995. The essays are wide-ranging in subject matter, addressing topics from politics, to nature, to midcentury domestic life, but all reflect Kingsolver’s observations about herself and the people around her. Prior to her writing career, Kingsolver had a wide range of other professional experiences that influence essays in the book.Most of the essays in High Tide... Read High Tide in Tucson Summary

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SummaryHoly the Firm is a 1977 book on Christian spirituality by American naturalist and author Annie Dillard. Dillard, whose 1974 Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, is often championed for her ability to describe and narrativize the natural world. In Holy the Firm, Dillard applies this ability to what happened during a three-day period on an island in Puget Sound. Dillard ultimately stayed on this Island for two years... Read Holy the Firm Summary

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This guide is based on the electronic version of Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” available at the University of Virginia’s Mules and Men website. The original essay was published in the May 1928 edition ofThe World Tomorrow. Hurston’s essay is her explanation of how she experiences being African-American.Hurston opens the essay with the comment that she is “a Negro” and unlike many African-Americans claims no Native American ancestry. Prior to... Read How It Feels To Be Colored Me Summary

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How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (1992) by Croatian essayist and journalist Slavenka Drakulić details life in Communist Eastern Europe, especially the former Yugoslavia (which after 1989 would become eight distinct countries, including Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, and Montenegro). Drakulić wrote this collection in response to the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and dissolution of the USSR; in her view, there was more political coverage than reflections of how communism affected quotidian life. In... Read How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed Summary

Content Warning: Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body describes and references rape and sexual violence, emotional abuse, and verbal abuse.Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017) is a memoir by Roxane Gay that addresses the emotional, physical, and psychological effects of sexual assault—and how they tie into self-image. Though Gay’s memoir centers her body, food, and self-image, she also confronts society’s fatphobia—the world’s unwillingness to accept fat people as they are due to assumptions about... Read Hunger Summary

I Am Not Your Negro by James Baldwin and Raoul Peck is an accompanying text to the 2016 documentary of the same name, directed by Peck. The documentary was released to critical acclaim. It won Best Documentary award at the BAFTA Film Awards and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The text is essentially a transcript of the film, incorporating excerpts of interviews, television features, and films.I Am Not Your Negro... Read I Am Not Your Negro Summary

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream'' speech is one of the most celebrated oratory pieces in American history. King delivered the speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963 as the final speech of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Ruston organized the march to advocate for civil and economic rights for Black Americans, which was among the... Read I Have A Dream Speech Summary

Susan Sontag’s 1978 book Illness as Metaphor is an 87-page work of critical theory exploring the language we use to describe disease and its victims. The work was originally published in the New York Review of Books as three long-form essays. Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor while undergoing treatment for breast cancer, though not mentioned in the text. This genre—critical theoretical examinations of social and cultural events or phenomena—was where Sontag established her reputation. Illness... Read Illness As Metaphor Summary

The essay “In Praise of Shadows” was originally published in 1933 in Japan and was written by the Japanese author Jun’ichirō Tanizaki (1886-1965). His work spanned a wide array of subjects, including the cultural impact of World War II, sexuality, and family relationships. He was especially interested in exploring the cultural differences between Japan and the West. Tanizaki was awarded Japan’s Imperial Prize in Literature in 1949 and wrote novels, short stories, essays, plays, and... Read In Praise of Shadows Summary

In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens is a collection of essays, speeches, and letters by Alice Walker. The collection was published in 1983. Walker is also a novelist and a poet. Her most famous novel, The Color Purple, was published in 1982 and won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1983. The novel was adapted into a movie as well as a musical. These essays are collected from different books and... Read In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens Summary

The essay “I, Pencil,” also known as “I, Pencil: My Family Tree as Told to Leonard E. Read,” was first published by the American businessman and libertarian advocate Leonard E. Read in 1958. The essay first appeared in The Freeman, a publication of the Foundation for Economic Freedom (FEE), a think-tank he co-founded in 1946. Read was a staunch critic of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” an ambitious series of government policies and... Read I, Pencil Summary

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The essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” was written by Nicholas Carr. It was originally published in The Atlantic’s July/August 2008 issue. The essay stirred much debate, and in 2010, Carr published an extended version of the essay in book form, entitled The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. The essay begins and ends with an allusion to Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the initial allusion, Carr summarizes... Read Is Google Making Us Stupid? Summary

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This guide is based on the revised version of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," published as the fifth essay in Why We Can't Wait (1964).King's letter is a response to another open letter, "A Call for Unity," published in The Birmingham News and collectively authored by eight Alabama clergymen who argued that the protests were not an appropriate response to conditions in Birmingham.King opens the letter by explaining that he is responding... Read Letter From Birmingham Jail Summary

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Letters to a Young Poet is a collection of 10 letters written by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke to Franz Xaver Kappus, from February 1903 to December 1908. In an introduction to the book, Kappus describes how he came to begin his correspondence with Rilke. At the time, Kappus was a 19-year-old student at an Austrian military school. Though Kappus was set to become a military officer, he held aspirations of instead becoming a... Read Letters to a Young Poet Summary

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Jonathan Kozol’s Letters to a Young Teacher, originally published in 2007, is a collection of letters containing Kozol’s teaching advice for a new first grade schoolteacher named Francesca. The format of this book is inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous Letters to a Young Poet, which has become a model for advice books for young people in different professions and callings. Although some identifying elements have been changed, the book’s letters represent a real correspondence... Read Letters to a Young Teacher Summary

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... Read Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address Summary

... Read Manifestoes of Surrealism Summary

Men Explain Things to Me is Rebecca Solnit’s 19th book. First published in 2014, it is comprised of a collection of essays primarily concerned with gender politics. The first essay explores men silencing women. It begins with Solnit recounting a conversation with “Mr. Very Important” in which he asks her about her writing, only to talk over her and lecture her about a book that, it turns out, she actually wrote. She uses this to... Read Men Explain Things To Me Summary

One of the founding documents of Western philosophy, Plato’s Meno recounts a dialog on the nature of virtue between Socrates and his pupil Meno, a rising star among the leaders of ancient Greece. They discuss how virtue can be recognized, where it comes from, and whether it can be taught.Meno takes place in 402 BCE in Athens; Plato, Socrates’s most famous student, in 385 BCE wrote down his recollection of the conversation. It offers a... Read Meno Summary

David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day is a collection of twenty-seven essays exploring the author’s childhood in North Carolina, his relationship with his family, his time living in France, and observations about American social life. The book is comprised of two sections, Part One and Part Deux in which the latter half focuses primarily on Sedaris’s time in Normandy, France. Told with sardonic humor, each chapter deploys various levels of fantasy, irony, and other... Read Me Talk Pretty One Day Summary

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“Mother Tongue” explores Amy Tan’s relationship with the English language, her mother, and writing. This nonfiction narrative essay was originally given as a talk during the 1989 State of the Language Symposium; it was later published by The Threepenny Review in 1990. Since then, “Mother Tongue” has been anthologized countless times and won notable awards and honors, including being selected for the 1991 edition of Best American Essays.The original publication of “Mother Tongue,” which this... Read Mother Tongue Summary

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Notes of a Native Son is a collection of nonfiction essays by James Baldwin. Baldwin originally published the essays individually in various literary and cultural commentary magazines between 1948 and 1955. The Beacon Press first republished the essays as Notes of a Native Son in 1955. This study guide refers to the 2012 Beacon Press edition of Notes of a Native Son. Citations to page numbers, however, come from the volume The Price of the... Read Notes of a Native Son Summary

... Read On Being Sane in Insane Places Summary

“Once More to the Lake” is a narrative nonfiction essay written by E. B. White. The essay was originally published in Harper’s Magazine in 1941. White (1899-1985) was an American author best known for his children’s novels, including Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, as well as his contribution as co-author to The Elements of Style, a seminal English-language writing guide. “Once More to the Lake” recounts White’s experience of revisiting, as an adult, a lakefront... Read Once More to the Lake Summary

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On Liberty is a philosophical essay on ethics, society, and politics published in 1859 by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill. His work on the subject matter extended back several years, through an illustrious career as a politician and philosopher. Mill’s ideas center on the concept of utilitarianism, which emphasizes efficiency and collective well-being. The book remains in print in the 21st century.SummaryOn Liberty is divided into five chapters: an introduction; “On the liberty of... Read On Liberty Summary

On Photography is a 1977 collection of seven essays by American scholar, activist, and philosopher Susan Sontag. The essays were published in the New York Review of Books from 1973 to 1977 before publication in a single volume. Sontag explores the history of photography and its relationship to reality, the fine arts, and sociopolitical power structures. Individual essays explore these various relationships between photography and the world through a different lens before the culminating exploration... Read On Photography Summary

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Written in 1874 as part of his second Untimely Meditation, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben or On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, considers the proper functioning of history in service to human (and specifically German) life and culture.At the outset of his essay, Nietzsche distinguishes between advantageous and disadvantageous historical awareness. The “historical fever” in Germany at the time of writing is a disease in the... Read On The Advantage And Disadvantage Of History For Life Summary

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On Tyranny, by Timothy Snyder, PhD, describes how tyrants have dismantled 20th-century republics and replaced them with totalitarian regimes, and how threats to democracies still exist today, including in America. Published in 2017, On Tyranny holds the distinction of being a #1 New York Times bestseller. Dr. Snyder is a Yale professor of European history. His short and pithy book details the methods that demagogues, including Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, have used to degrade... Read On Tyranny Summary

Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century by Lauren Slater is a work of narrative non-fiction published in 2004 by W.W. Norton & Company. Slater, an American psychotherapist, examines 10 landmark psychological experiments—from B.F. Skinner’s infamous boxes to Harry Harlow’s primates—and, in doing so, she explores larger philosophical questions related to human freedom, the limits of science, and truth in art.Slater provides biographical details of the scientists behind each landmark experiment. She... Read Opening Skinner's Box Summary

One of the most important representatives of Renaissance philosophy, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (De hominis dignitate) was presented as a public discourse in 1486 but never published in his lifetime; Pico died in 1494, two years before its initial publication.In his oration, Pico investigates mankind, finding that pure reason is the highest level that man can reach. Alone among creatures, man has a part of every other creature. This... Read Oration on the Dignity of Man Summary

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One of the founding documents of Western philosophy, Plato’s dialog Phaedo sets forth some of the most important beliefs of Socrates, who shares these ideas with his disciples just before he is executed in ancient Athens. Phaedo is one of Plato’s most widely read works, second only to his Republic and Symposium. It ponders the nature of the human soul and the possibility of an afterlife.A well-known English translation by Benjamin Jowett is widely available... Read Phaedo Summary

Phaedrus is a dialogue written by Plato around 370 BC. It details a conversation between two characters, Phaedrus and Socrates. As with other dialogues by Plato, the characters are historical, but the conversation is not. The two encounter each other the morning after Phaedrus has heard Lysias, a prominent Athenian and famous orator, give a speech arguing against love. A man not in love, Lysias argues, is to be favored over one who is in... Read Phaedrus Summary

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard is a personal narrative describing her observations of a creek near her home in Virginia over the course of a year. Dillard, a suburban housewife, uses a first-person narrative voice to describe her walks, paying homage to a tradition of nature writing while posing large questions about the nature of God and wilderness. The author blends research into the natural world, philosophical inquiry, and poetic imagery while engaging... Read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Summary

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is an adaptation of three lectures that Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison delivered at the Massey Lectures at Harvard University in 1990. She turned the three-part series into a 91-page book, published in 1992 by Harvard University Press. The lectures concern issues of race in American literature and the ways that writers actively construct whiteness and blackness within literature. Morrison examines the claim that works in the... Read Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination Summary

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Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907) is a philosophical work by the American philosopher and psychologist William James. It consists of eight lectures originally delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston and at Columbia University in New York. James is closely associated with the philosophy of pragmatism, originally formulated by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, and this book is considered the major statement of the ideas and principles of... Read Pragmatism Summary

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“Preface to Lyrical Ballads” is an essay by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth. In 1798 Wordsworth wrote, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poetry collection Lyrical Ballads. Believing that the poems were so novel in theme and style that they required some explanation, Wordsworth wrote a prefatory essay to accompany the second edition of the poems in 1800; he then expanded the essay for the third edition of 1802.The “Preface” is often considered a manifesto... Read Preface to Lyrical Ballads Summary

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Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, first published in 1790, is written as a letter to a French friend of Burke’s family, Charles-Jean-François Depont, who requests Burke’s opinion of the French Revolution to date. Burke is a well-connected politician and political theorist of the late eighteenth century, though this tract would become his first significant work on the subject. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke speaks at length on the development... Read Reflections On The Revolution In France Summary

Regarding the Pain of Others is a book-length essay by Susan Sontag published in 2003. Sontag initially addresses a question posed to writer and anti-war activist Virginia Woolf: “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?” but then, deducing that war is perennial, Sontag uses the remainder of her book to examine the relation between photography and feelings and ideas about war. She insists on discussing specific wars and specific photographers because each work... Read Regarding the Pain of Others Summary

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The Second Treatise of Government is a philosophical text written by Enlightenment thinker and “Father of Liberalism” John Locke in 1689. When the treatise was published in the late 17th century, England was in a state of political unrest. King William III and Queen Mary II were in power, as monarch King James II had been deposed two years earlier. This period of history is known as the Glorious Revolution, and it followed years of... Read Second Treatise of Government Summary