A speech delivered to a nearly empty hall on the anniversary of a lynching — Chapman's moral reckoning with collective guilt is among the most extraordinary documents of the American conscience.
A posthumously published meditation on the social forces that shape opinion: Twain argues that our beliefs are largely formed by what feeds us, not what we have reasoned through.
Wright's autobiographical account of learning to survive in the Jim Crow South — a catalog of humiliations and adaptations that constitutes a primer in what systemic racism actually feels like from the inside.
Writing in the shadow of the atomic bomb, Porter meditates on the strange relationship between technology, catastrophe, and the human capacity — or incapacity — for foresight.
Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant0.0
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From The Souls of Black Folk — the tragic story of John Jones, a Black man whose education creates an unbridgeable distance between him and his Southern home.
A train conversation with an anti-Semitic army colonel becomes a sharp examination of American liberalism — and McCarthy's own complicity in a society that produces such men.
Eiseley compares himself to the brown wasps that return to a demolished nest — finding in this natural habit an image for the human compulsion to return to places that no longer exist.
Fitzgerald's unflinching account of his own mental and emotional collapse — a self-autopsy remarkable for its honesty and its refusal to redeem itself with a satisfying narrative arc.
Gould examines the myth that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown in 1839 — using it as a case study in why nations need origin myths, and why the truth is always messier and more interesting.
The rumor of a devil baby at Hull-House draws hundreds of women seeking to see it. Addams explores what the legend reveals about the inner lives of women living at the margins.
Updike's meditation on inhabiting a male body — the particular experiences of physicality, sexuality, and mortality that mark the male life from youth to old age.
Gass's meditation on the nature of failure — literary, personal, historical — argues that sinking is not the opposite of achievement but its necessary companion and condition.
A meditation on the Bronx drugstore of Ozick's childhood as the site of her education as a writer — and on the connection between the smell of ink and the desire to make something endure.
Frost's brief, resonant preface articulates his famous dictum: a poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom, making its way from surprise to a clarification of life.
Bellow meditates on the photographs and images that have formed his inner life — and on memory, loss, and the strange power of the visual to outlast the people it depicts.
A meditation on suicide — why people choose it, what stops them, and what it reveals about the relationship between hope, pain, and the will to continue in a world that offers no guarantees.
Mencken attends a Holy Roller revival meeting in the hills of Tennessee and renders the scene with his characteristic mix of contempt, humor, and grudging fascination.
