Includes writings by Dylan Thomas, Margaret Laurence, Wallace Stegner, Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Bruno Bettelheim, Joan Didion, Joyce Maynard, Fredelle Maynard, Loren Eiseley, E.B. White, Anatole Broyard, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, May Sarton, Woody Allen, Ned Rorem, Thomas Jefferson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, David McCullough, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, Annie Dillard, Margaret Mead, N. Scott Momaday, Benjamin Franklin, William Golding, Desmond Morris, Jacob Bronowski, M.F.K. Fisher, Isaac Asimov, Paul Theroux, Scott Russell Sanders, Oliver Sacks, Malcolm Cowley, Lewis Thomas, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Stephen Jay Gould, Eudora Welty, Thurber, Adrienne Rich, William Zinsser, H.L. Mencken, Gloria Naylor, Maxine Hong Kingston, Erich Fromm, George Orwell, Francis Bacon, John Donne, Samuel Johnson, Charles Lamb, John Henry Newman, Abraham Lincoln, Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, Hemingway, Faulkner, Updike, Anthony Burgess, Russell Baker, Jessica Mitford, Tom Wolfe, Alistair Cooke, Gloria Steinem, James Baldwin, Konrad Z. Lorenz, Carl Sagan, Edward Abbey, Chief Seattle, Joseph Wood Krutch, Gary Soto, Samuel L. Clemens, W.H. Auden, Ambrose Bierce, Blake, Barbara Tuchman, Barry Lopez, Hannah Arendt, Daniel J. Boorstin, Oscar Lewis, Jonathan Swift, Martin Luther King Jr., Machiavelli, Edith Hamilton, Arthur Koestler, Vladimir Nabokov, Northrop Frye, Alice Munro, Carl Jung, Robert Frost, S.I. Hayakawa, Aaron Copland, Joyce Carol Oates, Plato, Aesop, Robert Graves, Langston Hughes, PaulTillich, Gilbert Highet, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others.