Great Writing: A Reader for Writers

Great Writing provides a multi-genre collection of rhetorically organized essays, memoirs, speeches, stories, poems, and a play - all presented within familiar rhetorical contexts.

* indicates a new reading in this edition

1: DESCRIPTION

N. Scott Momaday: "The Last of the Kiowas"

E. B. White: "Once More to the Lake"

Emily Bronte: "Wuthering Heights, Chapter 1" (fiction)

*Annie Dillard: "Mantis"

Percy Bysshe Shelley: "Ozymadias" (poem)

*Virginia Woolf: "Death of the Moth"

Alfred Kazin: "The Kitchen"

*Linda Pastan, "Grudnow"

John Keats: "Ode To Autumn" (poem)

Melville Cane: "Snow Toward Evening" (poem)

2: NARRATION

Willa Cather: "A Wagner Matinee" (fiction)

Frederick Douglass: from "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave"

Emily Dickinson: "There"s Been a Death in the Opposite / House" (poem)

Raymond Carver: "My Father"s Life"

Countee Cullen: "Incident" (poem)

Judith Ortiz Cofer: "The Witch"s Husband"

William Blake: "The Chimney Sweeper" (poem)

James Joyce: "Araby" (fiction)

Langston Hughes: "Salvation"

Edgar Allan Poe: "The Tell-Tale Heart" (fiction)

*Ian Frazier: "Powwow"

*Maya Angelou: "Graduation"

*Nathaniel Hawthorne: "Wakefield" (fiction)

3: EXEMPLIFICATION

Maxine Hong Kingston: "Family Ghosts"

Barbara Tuchman: "The Black Death"

James Thurber: "Courtship through the Ages"

Walt Whitman: "There Was a Child Went Forth" (poem)

*William Safire: "Census 2000"

*Barbara Ehrenreich: "What I"ve Learned from Men"

Gwendelyn Brooks: "We Real Cool" (poem)

Robert Browning: "My Last Duchess" (poem)

William Zinsser: "Clutter"

4: PROCESS

Joan Didion: "On Keeping a Notebook"

Ernest Hemingway: "Camping Out"

*Jessica Mitford, "Behind the Formaldehyde Curtain"

Ovid: "The Creation"

Henry David Thoreau: "On Economy"

D.H. Lawrence: "The Rocking-Horse Winner" (fiction)

Ved Mehta: "The Baby Myna"

Carmara Laye: "The Gold Worker"

Lorrie Moore: "How to Become a Better Writer"

5: COMPARISON AND CONTRAST

Virginia Woolf: "Shakespeare"s Gifted Sister"

Amy Tan: "Two Kinds"

*Adam Gopnik: "Like a King"

Thomas Hardy: "The Ruined Maid"

Seamus Heaney: "Digging"

Susan Sontag: "Two Diseases"

Plato: "The Allegory of the Cave"

William Shakespeare: "My Mistress" Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun"

Robert Frost: "Fire and Ice"

*Bruce Catton: "Grant and Lee: A Study in Contrasts"

Toni Morrison: "A Slow Walk of Trees"

Alice Walker: "Everyday Use"

6: CLASSIFICATION

*Judith Viorst: "Friends, Good Friends, and Such Good Friends"

Irwin Shaw: "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses"

Dylan Thomas: "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"

Henry Reed: "Naming of Parts"

*Barbara Defoe Whitehead: "The Plight of the High-Status Woman"

*Russell Baker: "The Plot Against People"

Ecclesiastes: "Chapter 3"

Malcolm Cowley: "The National Heartbeat: `We-ness" and `Me-ness""

Phillip Lopate: "Modern Friendships"

7: CAUSATION

Albert Camus: "The Myth of Sisyphus"

Kate Chopin: "The Story of an Hour" (fiction)

George Orwell: "Why I Write"

Langston Hughes: "Dream Deferred"

Edwin Arlington Robinson: "Richard Cory" (poem)

William Shakespeare: "When My Love Swears That She Is Made of Truth" (poem)

Jack London: "To Build a Fire"

*Andrew Sullivan: "The He Hormone"

*Patricia J. Williams: "Smart Bombs"

8: DEFINITION

Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Gifts"

Carson McCullers: "A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud"

Susan Brownmiller: "Feminity"

*Leonard Kriegel: "Claiming the Self: The Cripple as American Man"

Robert Graves: "The Naked and the Nude"

*Judy Brady: "I Want a Wife"

Marianne Moore: "Poetry"

*Stephen L. Carter: "The Insufficiency of Honesty"

Richard Rodriguez: "Complexion"

9: ARGUMENTATION AND PERSUASION

Martin Luther King Jr.: "I Have a Dream"

Jonathan Swift: "A Modest Proposal"

*Stephen Schulhofer: "Unwanted Sex"

Andrew Marvell: "To His Coy Mistress"

Wilfred Owen: "Dulce et Decorum Est"

*Jane Smiley: "The Case Against Chores"

*Katha Pollitt: "The Smurfette Principle"

Franz Kafka: "The Judgment"

John Stuart Mill: "On Liberty"

Anton Chekhov: "A Marriage Proposal"