Essays & Speeches

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Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason is both a defense of Deism and a rejection of the world’s major monotheistic religions. Published in three parts (1794, 1795, 1807), Age of Reason reflects Paine’s belief that a significant religious upheaval would follow in the wake of the American and French Revolutions. In France, privileged orders such as monarchy and aristocracy had been toppled, and the established Catholic Church had not survived the onslaught. Paine feared that... Read The Age Of Reason Summary

“The American Scholar” is a lecture by Ralph Waldo Emerson transposed into an essay; it is often classified under transcendentalism. The occasion for the lecture was an address that Emerson gave to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, on August 31, 1837. The subject of the lecture is the role of the American intellectual, as distinct from the European intellectual. Emerson calls for an intellectualism that is engaged, optimistic, and forward-thinking. He believes that... Read The American Scholar Summary

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Writer and professor Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, originally published in 2015, is a work of “autotheory”— it combines Nelson’s personal experiences of marriage and motherhood with reflections on the writing process, queer and feminist theory, and psychoanalysis and developmental psychology. This blending of genres gives the book its unconventional form; unlike a more traditional memoir, The Argonauts jumps backwards and forwards in Nelson’s life as she explores ideas and images related to pregnancy, sexuality, identity... Read The Argonauts Summary

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“The Ballot or the Bullet” is a speech that Malcolm X first delivered at Cory Methodist Church in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 3, 1964. He also delivered the speech about a week later in Detroit, Michigan, on April 12, 1964. This guide is based on the latter version of this speech.Malcolm speaks from a personal perspective. He starts by declaring himself a Muslim and by crediting Elijah Muhammad with making him into the man he... Read The Ballot or the Bullet Summary

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Audre Lorde was a poet, essayist, activist, and memoirist whose writings on lesbian feminism and race were integral to second-wave feminism. Lorde was born in New York City on February 18, 1934 to Grenadian immigrant parents. She attended Hunter High School, where she edited the school’s literary magazine. She published her first poem, which had been rejected by an English teacher, in Seventeen magazine. She later attended Hunter College, where she trained to become a... Read The Cancer Journals Summary

Ta-Nehisi Coates, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, published the essay “The Case for Reparations” in that magazine’s June 2014 issue. It was widely acclaimed and, according to the Washington Post, set a record at the time for the most-viewed article in a single day on The Atlantic website. The essay earned Coates a George Polk Award for commentary in 2014.In the essay, Coates examines the idea of the United States government paying reparations to... Read The Case for Reparations Summary

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The Control of Nature by John McPhee was published in 1989 and includes three essays/articles reported from different geographic locales that reflect one common theme: man attempting to control nature. McPhee got his start in journalism writing for Time magazine. He has written for The New Yorker for several decades and has published 30 books, including Annals of the Former World, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. He has also taught writing at Princeton... Read The Control of Nature Summary

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First published in Italy in 1986 as I sommersi e i salvati, The Drowned and the Saved, is a collection of eight essays by Primo Levi about his experiences in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. The book was translated into English in 1988 by Raymond Rosenthal. Some critics categorize The Drowned and the Saved as a memoir, while others believe it to be an autobiography; still other critics name this book a treatise in which... Read The Drowned and the Saved Summary

The Empathy Exams: Essays by Leslie Jamison is a collection of nonfiction essays that are connected thematically by pain and caring. Jamison uses a combination of personal experiences and journalistic approaches to ponder essential questions about both physical and emotional wounds, tenderness, and how people connect through pain. First published in April 2014, this collection premiered at #11 on the New York Times bestseller list and has received considerable acclaim from reviewers across the world... Read The Empathy Exams Summary

Published in 1948 in the wake of World War II, The Ethics of Ambiguity by French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) is a significant contribution to existentialist thought and outlines a practical system of ethics. Human freedom is of the utmost concern to the existentialist, and de Beauvoir argues that with human freedom comes ethical responsibility, countering those philosophers and skeptics who say that existentialism does not give practical guidance on how to live our... Read The Ethics Of Ambiguity Summary