Thomas Paine

"A monumental, canon-defining anthology of four centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith. Many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves--sometimes critically--to American values, but even in those that don't, one can detect a subtext about being American. The Founding Fathers and early American writers self-consciously struggle to establish a recognizable...