| Essay title
|
Original appearance
|
Original title/adaption
|
| "The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American"
|
The New York Times Book Review, 25 January 1959
|
|
| "Princes and Powers"
|
Encounter, January 1957
|
|
| "Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem"
|
Esquire, July 1960
|
|
| "East River, Downtown: Postscript to a Letter from Harlem"
|
The New York Times Magazine, March 12, 1961
|
"A Negro Assays the Negro Mood"
|
| "A Fly in Buttermilk"
|
Harper's, October 1958
|
"The Hard Kind of Courage"
|
| "Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter from the South"
|
Partisan Review, Winter 1959
|
|
| "Faulkner and Desegregation
|
Partisan Review, Fall 1956
|
|
| "In Search of a Majority"
|
Adapted from an address delivered at Kalamazoo College, February 1960
|
|
| "The Male Prison"
|
The New Leader, December 13, 1954
|
"Gide as Husband and Homosexual"
|
| "Notes for a Hypothetical Novel"
|
Adapted from an address delivered at an Esquire magazine symposium on "Writing in America Today," San Francisco State College, 22–24 October 1960
|
|
| "The Northern Protestant"
|
Esquire, April 1960
|
"The Precarious Vogue of Ingmar Bergman"
|
| "Alas, Poor Richard"
|
Section 1: Reporter, 16 March 1961
|
"The Survival of Richard Wright"
|
| Section 2: Encounter, April 1961
|
"Richard Wright"
|
| Section 3: Nobody Knows My Name
|
|
| "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy"
|
Esquire, May 1961
|
|
First edition cover