The Oxford Book of American Essays

Among these American essayists we may find all sorts and conditions of writers,—poets adventuring themselves in prose, novelists eschewing story-telling, statesmen turning for a moment to matters of less weight, men of science and men of affairs chatting about themselves and airing their opinions at large. In their hands, as in the hands of their British contemporaries, the essay remains infinitely various, refusing to conform to any single type, and insisting on being itself and on expressing its author. We find in the best of these American essayists the familiar style and the everyday vocabulary, the apparent simplicity and the seeming absence of effort, the horror of pedantry and the scorn of affectation, which are the abiding characteristics of the true essay. We find also the flavor of good talk, of the sprightly conversation that may sparkle in front of a wood fire and that often vanishes with the curling blue smoke.

Introduction
The Ephemera: an Emblem of Human Life
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790).
The Whistle
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790).
Dialogue Between Franklin and the Gout
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790).
Consolation for the Old Bachelor
Francis Hopkinson (1737-1791).
John Bull
Washington Irving (1783-1859).
The Mutability of Literature
Washington Irving (1783-1859).
Kean’s Acting
Richard Henry Dana (1787-1879).
Gifts
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882).
Uses of Great Men
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882).
Buds and Bird-voices
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864).
The Philosophy of Composition
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849).
Bread and the Newspaper
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894).
Walking
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862).
On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners
James Russell Lowell (1819-1891).
Preface To "Leaves of Grass"
Walt Whitman (1819-1892).
Americanism in Literature
Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911).
Thackeray in America
George William Curtis (1824-1892).
Our March To Washington
Theodore Winthrop (1828-1861).
Calvin (A Study of Character)
Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900).
Five American Contributions To Civilization
Charles William Eliot (1834- ).
I Talk of Dreams
William Dean Howells (1837- ).
An Idyl of the Honey-bee
John Burroughs (1837- ).
Cut-off Copples’s
Clarence King (1842-1901).
The Théâtre Français
Henry James (1843- ).
Theocritus on Cape Cod
Hamilton Wright Mabie (1846- ).
Colonialism in the United States
Henry Cabot Lodge (1850- ).
New York After Paris
William Crary Brownell (1851- ).
The Tyranny of Things
Edward Sandford Martin (1856- ).
Free Trade Vs. Protection in Literature
Samuel McChord Crothers (1857- ).
Dante and the Bowery
Theodore Roosevelt (1858- ).
The Revolt of the Unfit
Nicholas Murray Butler (1862- ).
On Translating the Odes of Horace