College Board - AP English Language and Composition Representative Authors lyrics

Representative Authors In his foreword to the 2007 installment of The Best American Essays,* Robert Atwan struggles with that “perplexing” genre we call “the essay.” He points out that some examples are unmistakable. We would recognize these as essays just as easily as we would recognize a sonnet. They “usually display several essential properties of the genre; they are autobiographical, self-reflective, stylistically engaging, intricately constructed, and provoked into being more often by internal literary pressures than by external occasions” (p . viii). These essays clearly follow in the tradition established by Montaigne when in 1580 he first applied the term to his own writings. However, these “literary essays” do not account for everything we regard as “essays” and certainly not everything that comes under the general heading of “nonfiction.” The genre of nonfiction prose, unlike that of fiction, poetry or drama, is defined by what it is not. For this reason, John McPhee named his course in nonfiction writing at Princeton University “the literature of fact.” According to Robert Atwan, nonfiction writing has also been named “creative nonfiction,” “prose,” “literary non-fiction,” or “essays and hybrid forms.” In addition to essays, nonfiction writing includes letters, diaries, histories, biographies, sermons, speeches, satire, social criticism and journalism in all of its forms. Sometimes it is hard to place any one writer (or even any one work) into just one category. After years of involvement with the Best American Essays series, Atwan once accepted the challenge to define the essay definitively. “I struggled to develop a definition,” he writes, “starting broadly and then refining, and refining, and refining until I arrived at the essence of the genre in one sentence.... I realized my attempt, my trial, was so hopelessly reductive that I would hereafter keep my feeble definition from circulation” (p. x). The following list of authors is designed to illustrate the possibilities of nonfiction prose. It is divided into two categories: Pre-20th Century and 20th Century to the Present. There is no recommended or required reading list for the AP English Language and Composition course. The list below is provided to suggest the range and quality of reading expected in the course. AP teachers may select authors from the list or may choose others of comparable quality and complexity. Pre-20th Century Joseph Addison, Matthew Arnold, Francis Bacon, James Boswell, Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jean de Crèvecoeur, Charles Darwin, Thomas De Quincey, Frederick Dougla**, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Benjamin Franklin, Margaret Fuller, Edward Gibbon, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Hazlitt, Thomas Hobbes, Harriet Jacobs (Linda Brent), Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Johnson, Charles Lamb, John Locke, Thomas Macaulay, Niccolò Machiavelli, John Stuart Mill, John Milton, Michel de Montaigne, Thomas More, Thomas Paine, Francis Parkman, Walter Pater, Samuel Pepys, John Ruskin, George Bernard Shaw, Richard Steele, Jonathan Swift, Henry David Thoreau, Alexis de Tocqueville, Oscar Wilde, Mary Wollstonecraft 20th Century to the Present Edward Abbey, Diane Ackerman, James Agee, Paula Gunn Allen, Roger Angell, Natalie Angier, Gloria Anzaldúa, Hannah Arendt, Michael Arlen, Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Dave Barry, Melba Patillo Beals, Simone de Beauvoir, Lerone Bennett Jr., Wendell Berry, Sven Birkerts, Susan Bordo, Jacob Bronowski, David Brooks, William F. Buckley, Judith Butler, Rachel Carson, G.K. Chesterton, Winston Churchill, Kenneth Clark, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Jill Ker Conway, Arlene Croce, Richard Dawkins, Vine Deloria Jr., Daniel Dennett, Jared Diamond, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, Maureen Dowd, Elizabeth Drew, W.E.B. Du Bois, Leon Edel, Gretel Ehrlich, Loren Eiseley, Richard Ellmann, Nora Ephron, Niall Ferguson, Timothy Ferris, M.F.K. Fisher, Frances Fitzgerald, Janet Flanner (Genêt), Tim Flannery, Shelby Foote, Richard Fortey, John Hope Franklin, Antonia Fraser, Thomas L. Friedman, Paul Fussell, John Kenneth Galbraith, Mavis Gallant, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Atul Gawande, Ellen Goodman, Nadine Gordimer, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, David Halberstam, Elizabeth Hardwick, Elva Trevino Hart, Chris Hedges, John Hersey, Christopher Hitchens, Edward Hoagland, Richard Holmes, Bell Hooks, Zora Neale Hurston, Pauline Kael, Evelyn Fox Keller, Helen Keller, George Kennan, Jamaica Kincaid, Martin Luther King Jr., Barbara Kingsolver, Maxine Hong Kingston, Naomi Klein, Paul Krugman, Alex Kuczynski, Lewis H. Lapham, T.E. Lawrence, Aldo Leopold, Gerda Lerner, Andy Logan, Philip Lopate, Barry Lopez, Norman Mailer, Nancy Mairs, Peter Matthiessen, Mary McCarthy, Frank McCourt, Bill McKibben, John McPhee, Margaret Mead, H.L. Mencken, Jessica Mitford, N. Scott Momaday, Jan Morris, John Muir, Donald M. Murray, V.S. Naipaul, Geoffrey Nunberg, Joyce Carol Oates, Barack Obama, Tillie Olsen, Susan Orlean, George Orwell, Cynthia Ozick, Steven Pinker, Francine Prose, David Quammen, Arnold Rampersad, Ishmael Reed, Rick Reilly, David Remnick, Adrienne Rich, Mordecai Richler, Richard Rodriguez, Sharman Apt Russell, Carl Sagan, Edward Said, Scott Russell Sanders, George Santayana, Simon Schama, Arthur M. Schlesinger, David Sedaris, Richard Selzer, Leslie Marmon Silko, Barbara Smith, Red Smith, Susan Sontag, Shelby Steele, Lincoln Steffens, Ronald Takaki, Paul Theroux, Lewis Thomas, George Trevelyan, Calvin Trillin, Barbara Tuchman, Cynthia Tucker, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, John Updike, Gore Vidal, Alice Walker, Jonathan Weiner, Eudora Welty, Cornel West, E.B. White, George Will, Terry Tempest Williams, Garry Wills, E.O. Wilson, Edmund Wilson, Tom Wolfe, Virginia Woolf, Richard Wright, Malcolm X, Anzia Yezierska