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Frontmatter -- PREFACE -- CONTENTS -- Beauty for Ashes -- A View of Mountains -- The Boat -- Josephine Guezou -- Twentieth-Century Odyssey -- A Farewell to Hue -- Looking for Trouble -- The Forthright Estate: In Praise of the Newspaper Column -- Code of Ethics -- Father of His Country -- Workplace Discrimination -- Harassment by Kids: Are More Lawsuits the Answer? -- Driver's Education -- People and Character -- Saving The Nation -- Faith, Sex, Mystery -- My Own Vox Pop -- Stardom? They'd Rather Pass -- Space Invaders -- The Country Is at Crisis Point -- Memo to Conservatives: Family Ties Are the Strongest Values of All -- All Sentient Beings -- When Worlds Collide -- First Born, Fast Grown: The Manful Life of Nicholas, 10 -- Massacre at Columbine High School -- Gender in the Classroom -- Cop-Out on Class: Why Private Schools Are Today's Draft Deferments -- It's a Wonderful Legacy -- The Era of Bad Feeling -- Two of a Kind -- Truly a Nation . . . -- A Little Homer at the Beach -- Why I Can't Write Fiction -- On Robert Lowell -- The Miss Dennis School of Writing -- Meeting Mahfouz -- Critic's Notebook -- L'Atalante -- Annie of Corsica -- Two Deaths—One Then, One Now: On Losing a Father, a Newspaperman -- Heavy Lifting -- Lenin Peak -- From So Simple a Beginning -- Pioneer 10 Pushes Beyond Goals, Into the Unknown -- Get Set to Say Hi to the Neighbors -- Left the Light On, But Nobody Came -- The Invisible Flying Cat -- At Least the Monsters Survive -- Beauty, as Scientists Behold It -- Manual Labor -- Maintenance Not Included -- At Last, Shout of "Eureka!" in Age-Old Math Mystery -- Scientist Reports First Cloning Ever of Adult Mammal -- What If We Succeed? -- Deus Conservat Omnia -- Introduction to Morgan, American Financier -- Down Twenty-Three Steps -- The Forest Coup -- Pictures from the Rubble Patch -- A Corner of Russia -- Goodbye to Rafah -- Mock Democracy -- The Big Barbecue -- The Rope Line -- Nixonland -- Consultants: The Men Who Came to Dinner -- Class Act -- The New American Heartland -- The 1950s -- Jazz: Music Beyond Time and Nations -- Miracle Kid -- Travels of the Rock -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- INDEX In 1957--long before colleges awarded degrees in creative nonfiction and back when newspaper writing's reputation was tainted by the fish it wrapped--Princeton began honoring talented literary journalists. Since then, fifty-nine of the finest, most dedicated, and most decorated nonfiction writers have held the Ferris and McGraw professorships. This monumental volume harbors their favorite and often most influential works. Each contribution is rewarding reading, and collectively the selections validate journalism's ascent into the esteem of the academy and the reading public. Necessarily eclectic and delightfully idiosyncratic, the fifty-nine pieces are long and short, political and personal, comic and deadly serious. Students will be provoked by William Greider's pointed critique of the democracy industry, eerily entertained by Leslie Cockburn's fraternization with the Cali cartel, inspired by David K. Shipler's thoughts on race, unsettled by Haynes Johnson's account of Bay of Pigs survivors, and moved by Lucinda Frank's essay on a mother fighting to save a child born with birth defects. Many of the essays are finely crafted portraits: Charlotte Grimes's biography of her grandmother, Blair Clark's obituary for Robert Lowell, and Jane Kramer's affecting story of a woman hero of the French Resistance. Other contributions to savor include Harrison Salisbury on the siege of Leningrad, Landon Jones on the 1950s, Christopher Wren on Soviet mountaineering, James Gleick on technology, Gloria Emerson on Vietnam, Gina Kolata on Fermat's last theorem, and Roger Mudd on the media. Whether approached chronologically, thematically, randomly, or, as the editors order them, more intuitively, each suggests a perfect evening reading. Designed for students as well as general readers, The Princeton Anthology of Writing splendidly attests to the elegance, eloquence, and endurance of fine nonfiction
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