Includes short stories, poems, plays, and essays by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Stephen Crane, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Frank O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor, Toni Cade Bambara, Sandra Cisneros, William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A.E. Housman, William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, Robert Graves, Stevie Smith, Countee Cullen, Dylan Thomas, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Larkin, Anthony Hecht, Peter Meinke, Robert Mezey, June Jordan, Bruce Bennett, Deborah Pope, Molly Peacock, Katherine McAlpine, Jill Bialosky, Nick Flynn, Sophocles, Tennessee Williams, Langston Hughes, Joan Didion, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Herman Melville, Franz Kafka, James Thurber, Richard Wright, Shirley Jackson, Ursula K. LeGuin, Harlan Ellison, Amy Tan, Tennyson, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Wallace Stevens, Claude McKay, Bertolt Brecht, W.H. Auden, Muriel Rukeyser, Richard Wilbur, Denise Levertov, Philip Levine, Marge Piercy, Stephen Dunn, Rober t Pinsky, Nikki Giovanni, Carolyn Forche, Henrik Ibsen, August Wilson, Jonathan Swift, Thomas Jefferson, Emma Goldman, Martin Luther King Jr., William Faulkner, James Baldwin, Chinua Achebe, Bharati Mukherjee, Alice Walker, Barry Lopez, Jamaica Kincaid, Louise Erdrich, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, E.E. Cummings, Anne Sexton, Etheridge Knight, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Wole Soyinka, Linda Hogan, Taslima Nasrin, Arthur Miller, Lorraine Hansberry, Athol Fugard, Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, George Orwell, Maya Angelou, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Irwin Shaw, Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, Sappho, Shakespeare, Thomas Campion, John Donne, Edmund Waller, Andrew Marvell, Robert Burns, Walt Whitman, Matthew Arnold, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, May Sarton, Robert Hayden, Anthony Hecht, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Audre Lord, Lucille Clifton, Seamus Heaney, Billy Collins, Sharon Olds, Gary Soto, Susan Glaspell, Erich Fromm, Maxine Hong Kingston, Edgar Allan Poe, Leo Tolstoy, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Anne Porter, Bernard Malamud, Bessie Head, Tim O'Brien, Leslie Marmon Silko, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Antonio Machado, Wilfred Owen, Pablo Neruda, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, Maxine Kumin, Mary Oliver, Samuel Beckett, Woody Allen, Harvey Fierstein, Mark Twain, Jessica Mitford, and others.