Creative Nonfiction Comprehensive Exam Reading List
Lopate, Philip. “Introduction.” The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the
Present. (Works from this anthology in the list below will be noted “Lopate.”)
PRE-20TH CENTURY ESSAYS
Arnold, Matthew,
--“Sweetness and Light,” from Culture
and Anarchy and http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~ian/arnold.htm
--“Literature and Science” from Discourses in America and
http://www.nd.edu/~cvandenb/MA.C&A.select.pdf
Johnson, Samuel, “The Solitude of the Country.” (Lopate)
Lamb, Charles, “New Year’s Eve.” (Lopate)
Montaigne, Michel de,
--“Of Books,”(Lopate)
--“Of a Monstrous Child.” (Lopate)
Plutarch, “Consolation to his Wife.” (Lopate)
Seneca, “Of Noise.” (Lopate)
Stevenson, Robert Louis, “The Lantern Bearers.” (Lopate)
Swift, Jonathan, “A Modest Proposal.” http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm
PRE-20TH CENTURY BOOKS
Eastman, Charles, From the Deep Woods to Civilization
Harriet Jacobs, Harriet, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Shonagon, Sei. The Pillow Book
Thoreau, Henry David, Walden
Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Vindication of The Rights of Women
20TH CENTURY ESSAYS
Borges, Jorge “Blindness.” (Lopate)
Lopez, Barry,
--“The American Geographies”
--“Landscape and Narrative”
Orwell, George,
--“A Hanging”
--“Politics and the English Language”
--“Shooting an Elephant”
--“Why I Write”
Rich, Adrienne, “Split at the Root.” (Lopate)
Rodriguez, Richard “Late Victorians.” (Lopate)
Stein, Gertrude,
--“Tender Buttons”
--“Picasso”
--“If I Told Him (A Completed Portrait of Picasso)”
Wallace, David Foster,
--“Brief Interviews with Hideous Men”
--“Consider the Lobster”
--“Ticket to the Fair”
White, E.B., “Once More to the Lake.” (Lopate)
20TH CENTURY BOOKS
Abbey, Edward, Desert Solitaire
Achebe, Chinua, Home and Exile
Baldwin, James, Notes of a Native Son
Beard, JoAnn, Boys of my Youth
Capote, Truman, In Cold Blood
Chatwin, Bruce, Songlines
Didion, Joan, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Dillard, Annie, The Writing Life
Ehrlich, Gretel, Solace of Open Spaces
Eire, Carlos, Waiting for Snow in Havana : Confessions of a Cuban Boy
Exupery, Antoine Saint,Wind, Sand and Stars
Gawande, Atul, Complications
Gornick, Vivian, The Situation and the Story
Hampl, Patricia, I Could Tell You Stories
Herr, Michael, Dispatches
Kingston, Maxine Hong, Woman Warrior
Krakauer, Jon, Into thin Air
Least Heat Moon, William, Blue Highways
Leopold, Aldo, A Sand County Almanac
Lynch, Thomas, The Undertaking
McPhee, John, Coming into the Country
Morrison, Toni, Playing In The Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
Muir, John, Travels in Alaska
Nabokov, Vladimir, Speak, Memory
Nelson, Richard, Make Prayers to the Raven
Pollan, Michael, The Botany of Desire: a Plant’s-eye View of the World
Robinson, Marilynne, When I was a Child I Read Books
Simpson, Sherry, The Accidental Explorer
Skloot, Rebecca, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own