Religio Laici; Or a Laymans Faith
John Dryden
Online version

An Essay on Criticism
Alexander Pope
Online version

“A Modest Proposal”
Jonathan Swift
In Fakundiny, The Art of the Essay
Online version

“The Solitude of the Country”
Samuel Johnson
In Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay
Online version (After link opens, scroll to The Adventurer, No. 126: Saturday, January 19, 1754

“On Going a Journey”
William Hazlitt
In Fakundiny, The Art of the Essay, and Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay
Online version

“Illusions”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In Fakundiny, The Art of the Essay
Online version

“Walking”
Henry David Thoreau
In Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay
Online version

“Solitude”
Alice Meynell
In Fakundiny, The Art of the Essay
Online version

“The Mowing of a Field”
Hilaire Belloc
In Fakundiny, The Art of the Essay
Online version

“A Piece of Chalk”
G. K. Chesterton
In Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay
Online version

“The Death of the Moth”
Virginia Woolf
In Fakundiny, The Art of the Essay, and Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay
Online version

“Tradition and the Individual Talent”
T. S. Eliot
In Fakundiny, The Art of the Essay
Online version

“A Worm from My Notebook”
Richard Selzer
In Fakundiny, The Art of the Essay

“Silence”
Scott Russell Sanders
From Sanders, The Force of Spirit

“God in the Doorway”
Annie Dillard
From Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk

“Reflections on Gandhi”
George Orwell
In Fakundiny, The Art of the Essay
Online version

“The Seam of the Snail”
Cynthia Ozick
From Ozick, Metaphor and Memory
In One Hundred Great Essays, edited by Robert DiYanni

“Eternal Ink”
Anne Fadiman
From Fadiman, Ex Libris

“Composing a Life”
Sam Pickering
From Pickering, A Continuing Education
In The Signet Book of American Essays, edited by M. Jerry Weiss and Helen Weiss

“The Ring of Time”
E. B. White
In Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay
Online version

“How It Feels to Be Colored Me”
Zora Neale Hurston
In Fakundiny, The Art of the Essay
Online version

“On Being a Cripple”
Nancy Mairs
From Mairs, Plaintext
In One Hundred Great Essays, edited by Robert DiYanni; 75 Readings: An Anthology, edited by Santi V. Buscemi and Charlotte Smith; 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology, edited by Samuel Cohen; and The Writer's Presence: A Pool of Essays, edited by Donald McQuade and Robert Atwan

“Notes of a Native Son”
James Baldwin
In Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay

“What I Think, What I am”
Edward Hoagland
In Modern American Prose: Fifteen Writers + 15, edited by John Clifford and Robert DiYanni