The Norton Book of Personal Essays collects approximately fifty of the finest personal essays of the twentieth century, selected and introduced by Joseph Epstein, the man often hailed as the "premier essayist of our time." In them, some of our most admired American and British writers express their lively, candid, entertaining, thoughtful, and - above all - varied opinions. Topics range from Tangiers to a lake in Maine, from racial conflict to sky diving, from the expectations we bring to travel to the athletics of the table. Most prominent in each essay is the distinctive style of the essayist; style, as Epstein points out in his introduction, not only is what keeps literature alive but also is a personal way of looking at the world.