White - On keeping a notebook / Joan Didion - from Journal / Ralph Waldo Emerson - from Journal / Henry David Thoreau - Abraham Lincoln / Walt Whitman - A Visit to Grosse Isle / Susanna Moodie - from Journal of a Solitude / May Sarton - Selections from The Allen notebooks / Woody Allen - George Washington / Thomas Jefferson - Abraham Lincoln / Nathaniel Hawthorne - Yeager / Tom Wolfe - The Case of Harry Houdini / Daniel Mark Epstein - My father: Leslie Stephen / Virginia Woolf - Under the Influence / Scott Russell Sanders - Terwilliger bunts one / Annie Dillard - For my American family / June Jordan - More room / Judith Ortiz Cofer - True North / Margaret Atwood - The Way to Rainy Mountain / N. Graduation / Maya Angelou - A Victim / Bruno Bettelheim - The Town dump / Wallace Stegner - On Dumpster diving / Lars Eighner - How it feels to be colored me / Zora Neale Hurston - On being a cripple / Nancy Mairs - Beauty: When the other dancer is the self / Alice Walker - Memories of Christmas / Dylan Thomas - On Going home / Joan Didion - St Urbain Street then and now / Mordecai Richler - Four generations / Joyce Maynard - The Brown wasps / Loren Eisley - Last onsets: teaching with AIDS / Michael Lynch - Once more to the lake / E.B. Includes bibliographical references and index