The Oxford Book of American Essays

Chosen by Brander Matthews

From Franklin and Emerson to Whitman and Roosevelt, Brander Matthews expertly selected 32 essays on topics literary, political and humorous spanning over a century of this form’s development in America.

Bibliographic Record Introduction

Contents

NEW YORK: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1914
NEW YORK: BARTLEBY.COM, 2000

1. The Ephemera: An Emblem of Human Life, by Benjamin Franklin
2. The Whistle, by Benjamin Franklin
3. Dialogue Between Franklin and the Gout, by Benjamin Franklin
4. Consolation for the Old Bachelor, by Francis Hopkinson
5. John Bull, by Washington Irving
6. The Mutability of Literature, by Washington Irving
7. Kean’s Acting, by Richard Henry Dana
8. Gifts, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
9. Uses of Great Men, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
10. Buds and Bird-voices, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
11. The Philosophy of Composition, by Edgar Allan Poe
12. Bread and the Newspaper, by Oliver Wendell Holmes
13. Walking, by Henry David Thoreau
14. On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners, by James Russell Lowell
15. Preface to “Leaves of Grass,” by Walt Whitman
16. Americanism in Literature, by Thomas Wentworth Higginson
17. Thackeray in America, by George William Curtis
18. Our March to Washington, by Theodore Winthrop
19. Calvin (A Study of Character), by Charles Dudley Warner
20. Five American Contributions to Civilization, by Charles William Eliot
21. I Talk of Dreams, by William Dean Howells
22. An Idyl of the Honey-bee, by John Burroughs
23. Cut-off Copples’s, by Clarence King
24. The Théâtre Francais, by Henry James
25. Theocritus on Cape Cod, by Hamilton Wright Mabie
26. Colonialism in the United States, by Henry Cabot Lodge
27. New York After Paris, by William Crary Brownell
28. The Tyranny of Things, by Edward Sandford Martin
29. Free Trade vs. Protection in Literature, by Samuel McChord Crothers
30. Dante and the Bowery, by Theodore Roosevelt
31. The Revolt of the Unfit, by Nicholas Murray Butler
32. On Translating the Odes of Horace, by William Peterfield Trent