1850's : The town-ho's story / Herman Melville ; Union saving / Editor's Table ; Uttoxeter / Nathaniel Hawthorne ; The siege of Fort Atkinson ; The dividing line between federal and local authority / Stephen A. Douglas
1860's : The battle of Antietam / George F. Noyes ; Psyche / Hans Christian Andersen ; The fortunes of war / Robert Tomes The march to the sea / Herman Melville ; The freedman's story / M. Schele de Vere ; The plains, As I crossed them ten years ago / Horace Greeley
1870's : Charles Dickens / George William Curtis, Editor's Easy Chair ; Down the Mississippi / George Ward Nichols ; Political life in America / George William Curtis, Editor's Easy Chair ; The little laborers of New York City / C.L. Brace ; Panic in Wall Street ; Song of the redwood-tree / Walt Whitman ; A song / Christina Rossetti ; Boss Tweed / George William Curtis, Editor's Easy Chair
1880's : Washington Square / Henry James ; Women's rights / George William Curtis, Editor's Easy Chair ; Our public land policy / Veeder B. Paine ; Ulysses S. Grant / George William Curtis, Editor's Easy Chair ; Strikes and anarchy / George William Curtis, Editor's Easy Chair
1890's : His ship / James Russell Lowell ; Fame's little day / Sarah Orne Jewett ; St. Clair's defeat / Theodore Roosevelt ; With the Fifth Corps / Frederic Remington ; The angel child / Stephen Crane
1900's : Extracts from Adam's diary and Eve's diary / Mark Twain ; The quicksand / Edith Wharton ; The integrity of American character / Grover Cleveland ; The sun-dog trail / Jack London ; Feeding the mind / Lewis Carroll ; The informer / Joseph Conrad ; The enchanted bluff / Willa Sibert Cather
1910's : Night in a suburb / Thomas Hardy ; The rabbit-pen / Sherwood Anderson ; The country newspaper / William Allen White ; My plunge into the slums / M.E. Ravage ; The country doctor / Theodore Dreiser ; The lion's mouth: Mother Goose, propagandist / Don Marquis ; Eighty years and after / William Dean Howells
1920's : The gods of the copybook maxims / Rudyard Kipling ; Fire and ice / Robert Frost ; To the ghost of John Milton / Carl Sandburg ; Crime and the alarmists / Clarence S. Darrow ; In praise of freedom / Will Durant ; Re-discovering Europe / Edward S. Martin, Editor's Easy Chair ; Aimee Semple McPherson / Sarah Comstock ; My countryside, then and now / Malcolm Cowley ; Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Archibald MacLeish ; The lady in the looking-glass / Virginia Woolf
1930's : The peculiar weakness of Mr. Hoover / Walter Lippmann ; Sonnet / Edna St. Vincent Millay ; "Listen to this, dear" / James Thurber ; A death in the country / Stephen Vincent Benét ; What Hitler wants / Leon Trotsky ; Was my life worth living? / Emma Goldman ; The future of English / H.L. Mencken ; The chrysanthemums / John Steinbeck ; Solitude / ; Rainer Maria Rilke ; America's medieval women / Pearl S. Buck ; One man's meat: Walden Pond / E.B. White ; Since yesterday / Frederick Lewis Allen
1940's : Who goes Nazi? / Dorothy Thompson ; The wide net / Eudora Welty ; What you don't know won't hurt you / Richard Wright ; The people at war / John Dos Passos ; Going home / Alfred Kazin ; Iwo Jima before H-hour / John P. Marquand ; Our worst wartime mistake / Eugene V. Rostow ; The decision to use the atomic bomb / Henry L. Stimson ; Gertrude Stein: a self-portrait / Katherine Anne Porter ; Anywhere in Europe / Anne Morrow Lindbergh ; Art for art's sake / E.M. Forster ; Vega / John Cheever
1950's : The century / Bernard DeVoto ; Evangelist / Joyce Cary ; The silent generation / Thornton Wilder ; Lamb to the slaughter / Roald Dahl ; The great Wall Street crash / John Kenneth Galbraith ; The sound of Moorish laughter / Harold Brodkey ; On fear: the South in labor / William Faulkner ; The farmer's wife / Anne Sexton ; Recollections from beyond the last rope / Philip Roth
1960's : Mushrooms / Sylvia Plath ; Vermont / John Updike ; The dangerous road before Martin Luther King / James Baldwin ; Miami notebook: Cassius Clay and Malcolm X / George Plimpton ; The paranoid style in American politics / Richard Hofstadter ; Mississippi: the fallen paradise / Walker Percy ; Long view: Negro / Langston Hughes ; The celebration / James Dickey ; History by the ounce / Barbara W. Tuchman ; Silences: when writers don't write / Tillie Olsen ; The player piano / Randall Jarrell ; Miami Beach and Chicago / Norman Mailer ; Survival U / John Fischer, Editor's Easy Chair
1970's : My Lai 4 / Seymour M. Hersh ; Is there a place for morality in foreign affairs? / Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. ; Everyday use / Alice Walker ; The death of Salvador Allende / Gabriel García Márquez ; The sound of tinkling brass / Murray Kempton ; Innocence in the Galápagos / Annie Dillard ; To the Disney station / Michael Harrington
1980's : Liberty under siege / Walter Karp ; The soccer war / Ryszard Kapuściński ; The moment before the gun went off / Nadine Gordimer ; Untime of the imam / Salman Rushdie ; When you're a crip (or a blood) ; Users, like me / Gail Regier ; Reassurance / Allan Gurganus ; Stalking the billion-footed beast / Tom Wolfe
1990's : Chronicle of a debacle foretold / L.J. Davis ; Late Victorians / Richard Rodriguez ; Ladies and gentlemen / Joyce Carol Oates ; The rake / David Mamet ; The 400-pound CEO / George Saunders ; The last shot / Darcy Frey ; On not being a victim / Mary Gaitskill ; Notebook: Morte de Nixon / Lewis H. Lapham ; Ticket to the fair / David Foster Wallace ; Where worlds collide / Pico Iyer ; Beyond belief / Fenton Johnson ; Exorcism / Lewis H. Lapham, Notebook.