Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

vol. 1. Angela's ashes / Frank McCourt -- Aspects of the novel / E. M. Forster -- Black boy / Richard Wright -- Darkness visible / William Styron -- The education of Henry Adams / Henry Brooks Adams -- The journalist and the murderer / Janet Malcolm -- Lindbergh / A. Scott Berg -- The making of the atomic bomb / Richard Rhodes -- My brother / Jamaica Kincaid -- Paula / Isabel Allende -- Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / Annie Dillard -- A preface to morals / Walter Lippmann -- Silent spring / Rachel Carson -- The souls of Black folk / W. E. B. Du Bois -- A study of history / Arnold J. Toynbee.

vol. 2. Anne Frank: the diary of a young girl / Anne Frank -- Cadillac desert: the American West and its disappearing water / Marc Reisner -- Design for dying / Timothy Leary -- The double helix / James D. Watson -- Eleanor Roosevelt, volume one, 1884-1933 / Blanche Wiesen Cook -- Good-bye to all that / Robert Graves -- I know why the caged bird sings / Maya Angelou -- In cold blood / Truman Capote -- Madame Curie / Eve Curie -- Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave, written by himself / Frederick Douglass -- Out of Africa / Isak Dinesen -- Profiles in courage / John Fitzgerald Kennedy -- A room of one's own / Virginia Woolf -- The story of my life / Helen Keller -- Undaunted courage / Stephen E. Ambrose.

vol. 3. The affluent society / John Kenneth Galbraith -- Autobiographies / William Butler Yeats -- The autobiography of Malcolm X / Malcolm X -- Backlash: the undeclared war against American women / Susan Faludi -- Coming of age in Mississippi / Anne Moody -- Hunger of memory: the education of Richard Rodriguez / Richard Rodriguez -- The interpretation of dreams / Sigmund Freud -- I remain in darkness / Annie Ernaux -- I will bear witness: a diary of the Nazi years, 1933-1941 / Victor Klemperer -- News of a kidnapping / Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- Operating instructions / Anne Lamott -- Self-reliance / Ralph Waldo Emerson -- Shadow and act / Ralph Ellison -- A theory of justice / John Rawls -- Walden / Henry David Thoreau.

vol. 4. The American language / H. L. Mencken -- The autobiography of Alice B. Toklas / Gertrude Stein -- The autobiography of Mark Twain / Mark Twain -- Black lamb and grey falcon: a journey through Yugoslavia / Rebecca West -- The diary of Samuel Pepys / Samuel Pepys -- Elizabeth the Great / Elizabeth Jenkins -- Eminent Victorians / Lytton Strachey -- The Gnostic gospels / Elaine Pagels -- In the American grain / William Carlos Williams -- Kaffir boy: the true story of a Black youth's coming of age in apartheid South Africa / Mark Mathabane -- Night / Elie Wiesel -- Notes of a native son / James Baldwin -- On growth and form / D'Arcy Thompson -- The promise of American life / Herbert Croly -- Speak, memory: an autobiography revisited / Vladimir Nabokov.

vol. 5. Art and illusion: a study in the psychology of pictorial representation / E. H. Gombrich -- The basketball diaries / Jim Carroll -- A boy called H / Kappa Senoh -- Bury my heart at Wounded Knee / Dee Brown -- The elements of style / William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White -- The feminine mystique / Betty Friedan -- The golden bough / James Frazer -- The liars' club / Mary Karr -- The lost daughters of China / Karin Evans -- A mathematician's apology / G. H. Hardy -- Selected essays, 1917-1932 / T. S. Eliot -- Shame / Annie Ernaux -- Steal this book / Abbie Hoffman -- The varieties of religious experience / William James.

Provides critical overviews on the most frequently studied nonfiction essays, books, biographies, and memoirs. Includes discussions of literary format, themes, and structure.

Description based on print version record.