Essays of the Masters

Charles Neider (1915-2001) edited Tolstoy: Tales of Courage and Conflict, Antarctica: Firsthand Accounts of Exploration and Endurance, Man Against Nature: Firsthand Accounts of Adventure and Exploration, and Great Shipwrecks and Castaways: Firsthand Accounts of Disasters at Sea.

...this volume contains 42 essays by the literati of American, English, and European letters, dating back to Melville, and his buddy Hawthorne, Dickens, and Goethe, to Conrad, Flaubert, Dostoevski, Poe, Twain, and Kipling, on up to Woolf and Hemingway. Lots of big shots discuss everything from Christmas to bullfighting, with a leaning toward literary matters.