his study began with two seemingly simple questions, "What essays do people read and where?" The short answer-and my thesis-is: "Those Americans who read essays at all find them reprinted in Readers, anthologies intended for freshman composition." No matter where an essay first appeared-in the New Yorker or a little magazine or on a newspaper's op-ed page-if it is to survive in the hearts and minds of the twentieth-century American reading public it must be reprinted time and again in a composition Reader (capitalized to distinguish it from the book's human reader). This article introduces the only essay canon to be publicly identified in the twentieth century. It is a teaching canon as distinct from a critical canon. Canon-makers make pronouncements and lists. Although I am not now and never have been related to any other Bloom of canonical persuasion, neither Harold ("Read my list!") nor Allan ("Read Great Books!"), I make the following claims. This article is the first to define this-or any-contemporary essay canon, the first to define that canon empirically rather than critically, and the first to discuss its formation, significance, status, and implications. Whether or not critics pay attention to essays, teachers do, and consequently so do their students. Thus this contemporary essay canon has profound implications-intellectual, aesthetic, pedagogical, and political-not only for what but also for how our nation's 2.2 million first-year college students read, and think, and write-and for how they'll think about reading and
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