Back to the Lake: A Reader for Writers

A fresh take on the traditional modes, showing how they are used in texts of all kinds, and that they are central to all the writing, speaking, and thinking that we do.

The Second Edition contains 34 new readings that teachers will want to teach and students will like to read, from Steven Pinker’s “Mind Over Mass Media” to Alex Horton’s “Advice for College-bound Vets,” as well as a chapter on academic writing, and editorial apparatus that explicitly links the readings to the writing instruction, with notes in the margins leading students from the text to specific examples in the readings—and the reverse.

Thomas Cooley (PhD, Indiana University) is professor of English at The Ohio State University. In addition to Back to the Lake, he is the editor of The Norton Sampler, The Norton Critical Edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the author of several other books, among them Educated Lives: The Rise of Modern Autobiography in America and The Ivory Leg in the Ebony Cabinet: Madness, Race, and Gender in Victorian America.