Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet (1929)

Virginia Woolf
A Room of One’s Own (1929)

Octavio Paz
The Labyrinth of Solitude  (1950 & 1975)

Isaiah Berlin
The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953)

Truman Capote
In Cold Blood (1966)

READER:

Martin Heidegger
“The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics” (chapter 1 of Introduction to Metaphysics) (1903)

Gertrude Stein
“Composition as Explanation” (1925)

George Orwell
“Politics and the English Language,” “Shooting an Elephant,” and “Such, Such Were the Joys” (mid-twentieth century)

James Baldwin
“Notes of a Native Son” (1955)

Susan Sontag
“Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964) and “Against Interpretation” (1966) (link)

Joan Didion
“Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “Goodbye to All That” (1967)

Jonathan Franzen
“Why Bother,” “The Reader in Exile”, “Meet Me in St. Louis,” and “The Foreign Language” (late twentieth and early twenty-first century)

David Foster Wallace
“Consider the Lobster” (2005)