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This index lists paragraphs on the website in the following categories:

  • biography
  • essay
  • history
  • journalism
  • letter
  • memoirs and autobiography
  • natural history
  • novel
  • novella
  • obituary
  • parody
  • review
  • short story

biography

  • “Antony,” Plutarch’s Lives
  • Louis de Rouvroy, Duc de Saint Simon, Memoirs (1696)
  • Nancy Mitford, Madame de Pompadour (1953)
  • William Maxwell, “The Bohemian Girl,” The Outermost Dream (1997)
  • V.S. Pritchett, "Jonathan Swift: The Infantilism of Genius," The Tale Bearers (1980)
  • Francine Prose, “Hester Thrale,” in The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired (2002)

essay

  • Leigh Hunt, "Getting Up on Cold Mornings" (1820)
  • Meyer Isenberg,"The Professor in the University," Journal of General Education (January, 1956)
  • Thomas Geoghegan, "Warren Court Children," The New Republic (May 19, 1986)
  • Alice Meynell, "Under the Early Stars" reprinted in John Gross, ed., The Oxford Book of Essays (1991)
  • William Maxwell, The Outermost Dream -- Essays and Reviews (1997)
  • Jonathan Franzen, "Lost in the Mail," How to Be Alone (2002)
  • Arthur Krystal, “Death, It’s What Ails You,” Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature (2002)
  • Ian Frazier, “If Memory Doesn’t Serve,” The Atlantic Monthly (October, 2004)
  • Joseph Epstein, “Forgetting Edmund Wilson,” Commentary (December, 2005)

history

  • “Antony,” Plutarch’s Lives
  • Thomas Babington Macaulay, "Lord Clive" (1840), reprinted in Critical and Historical Essays (1851)
  • J. H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (1950)
  • Nancy Mitford, Madame de Pompadour (1953)
  • W.H. Lewis, The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV (1953)
  • Fritz Stern, “National Socialism as Temptation,” in Dreams and Delusions: The Drama of German History (1987)

journalism

  • Letter of Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sevigne (1626-1696)
  • “Mrs. Viola Leslie of Mt. Vernon Observes her 87th Birthday,” Gazette-Republican, Mount Vernon, Iowa (October 28, 1928)
  • Michael Herr, Dispatches (1968)

letter

  • Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sevigne (1626-1696)
  • Letter from Horace Walpole, quoted in David Cecil, Library Looking-Glass -- A Personal Anthology (1975)
  • Honore Balzac to his sister Laure, reprinted in V.S. Pritchett, Balzac (1973)
  • Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), quoted by Francine Prose in “Alice Liddell,”the second piece in The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired (2002)

memoir and autobiography

  • William Cobbett, Cobbett's Weekly Political Register (February 19, 1820)
  • The Memoirs of Harriet Wilson (1825)
  • Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment (1869)
  • Oscar Wilde, de Profundis (1905)
  • John Muir, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913)
  • T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926)
  • James Thurber, “Snapshot of a Dog,” The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeeze (1935)
  • Duff Cooper, Old Men Forget (1953)
  • Leonard Woolf, Growing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880 to 1904 (1960)
  • V.S. Pritchett, A Cab at the Door (1968)
  • Andrea Lee, Russian Journal (1979)
  • Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage: a Greenwich Village Memoir (1993)
  • Tobias Wolff, In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War (1994)
  • Alden Jones, "Lard is Good for You," Coffee Journal (Winter 1998-1999)

natural history

  • Gerald Durrell, The Whispering Land (1983)

novel

  • Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1849-1850)
  • Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854)
  • John Galsworthy, The Man of Property (1906)
  • Sherwood Anderson, "Hands," in Winesburg Ohio (1919)
  • Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain [Sodom and Gomorrah] (1922), part five of Remembrance of Things Past, translated by C.K. Scott Montcrieff (1927)
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
  • William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)
  • Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians (1930)
  • John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (1937)
  • Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)
  • Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding (1946)
  • Edgar Box (Gore Vidal), Death Likes it Hot (1954)
  • Roddy Doyle, The Snapper (1990)
  • Elliot Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity (2003)
  • Cynthia Ozick, Heir to the Glimmering World (2004)

novella

  • Norman MacLean, A River Runs Through It (1976)
  • Richard Ford, "The Womanizer," Granta 40 (1992)

obituary

  • Sarah Boxer, "William Steig, 95, Dies; Tough Youths and Jealous Satyrs Scowled in His Cartoons," The New York Times (October 5, 2003)

parody

  • Edgar Box (Gore Vidal), Death Likes it Hot (1954)
  • David Sedaris, "Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol," Holidays on Ice (1997)
  • Ian Frazier, “Laws Concerning Food and Drink; Household Principles; Lamentations of the Father,” The Atlantic Monthly (February, 1997)

review

  • Arthur Krystal, “Death, It’s What Ails You,” Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature (2002)
  • Janet Malcolm, "Good Pictures," The New York Review of Books (January 15, 2004) (an essay and review of two books about Diane Arbus)

short story

  • Mary McCarthy, “The Friend of the Family,” Cast a Cold Eye (1950) (stories written from 1944 to 1950)
  • Sean O' Faolain, “Falling Rocks, Narrowing Road, Cul-de-sac, Stop,” Foreign Affairs (1976)
  • Harold Brodkey, First Love and Other Sorrows (1978)
  • Peter Collier, “Transference,” Canto (1979)
  • Raymond Carver, "Vitamins," Granta (1981)
  • Richard Ford, "Rock Springs" Granta (1983)
  • Charles Baxter, “Surprised by Joy,” Through the Safety Net (1985)
  • Stephen McCauley, “The Whole Truth,” Harper’s (1992)
  • Lorrie Moore, “If Only Bert Were Here,” The New York Times (1993)
  • Lorrie Moore, “Agnes of Iowa,” Granta 54 (1996)