Includes essays by Dylan Thomas, Margaret Laurence, Wallace Stegner, Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Richard Hugo, Bruno Bettelheim, Paul Fussell, Alice Walker, Scott Sanders, Joan Didion, Loren Eiseley, E.B. White, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, May Sarton, Woody Allen, Thomas Jefferson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, N. Scott Momaday, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, William Golding, Carl Sagan, Neil Postman, Jacob Bronowski, Isaac Asimov, Eudora Welty, James Thurber, William Zinsser, Lewis Thomas, H.L. Mencken, Gloria Naylor, Richard Rodriguez, Erich Fromm, George Orwell, Francis Bacon, John Donne, Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne, John Henry Newman, Abraham Lincoln, Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, Ernest Hemingway, Joyce Cary, William Faulkner, John Updike, Tom Wolfe, Robert Pirsig, John McPhee, Anthony Burgess, Wendell Berry, S.J. Perelman, Adrienne Rich, Gloria Steinem, Betty Rollin, Jessica Mitford, Jonathan Schell, Garrison Keillor, Carol Gilligan, Judith Viorst, Desmond Morris, Oliver Sacks, James Baldwin, Norman Podhoretz, Malcolm Cowley, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Samuel L. Clemens, Tom Regan, Stephen Jay Gould, W.H. Auden, William Blake, Ambrose Bierce, Benjamin Franklin, George Bernard Shaw, Chief Seattle, John Houseman, Hannah Arendt, Michael Arlen, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Ralph W. Conant, Martin Luther King Jr., Jonathan Swift, Niccolo Machiavelli, Walter Lippmann, Edward O. Wilson, Konrad Z. Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, Nigel Calder, Arthur Koestler, Thomas S. Kuhn, John Gardner, Vladimir Nabokov, Northrop Frye, Annie Dillard, Susanne K. Langer, Carl G. Jung, Robert Frost, Robertson Davies, Margaret Atwood, S.I. Hayakawa, Christopher Fry, Aaron Copland, Aesop, Plato, Jesus, Franz Kafka, Robert Graves, E.F. Schumacher, Langston Hughes, Paul Tillich, C.S. Lewis, E.M. Forster, Gilbert Highet, Jean-Paul Sartre, Tom Bethell, Alexander Petrunkevitch, Carl Becker, Kildare Dobbs, Herbert Butterfield, Michael Stone, Thomas Murray, Gilbert Ryle, Willard Gayli n, Edward Hallett Carr, Michael Herr, Frances FitzGerald, Carl Cohen, Judith Martin, Paul West, Robert Finch, Barbara Carson, John McMurtry, Brent Staples, Dan Lacy, Stanley Milgram, Phyllis Rose, Ian Frazier, Robert Burchfield, Wayne C. Booth, Nancy Sommers, John Leo, June Callwood, Daniel Mark Epstein, and others.