The essay form is an especially democratic one, and many of the 100 essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves—sometimes critically—to American values. Spanning three centuries, here are the Puritans (Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards), the Founders (Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson), and some luminaries of the 19th century (Thoreau, Lincoln, and Frederick Douglass). Showing an explosion of diversity, here too are Rachel Carson, Albert Einstein, Gertrude Stein, Audre Lorde, Marilynne Robinson, James Baldwin, and M.F.K. Fisher.