"Read, read, read," was novelist William Faulkner's advice to young writers. "Read everything--trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it."

Though some might question the merits of absorbing "trash," what's indisputable is Faulkner's injunction to read voraciously--to learn the craft of writing by studying how professional writers "do it." The one bit of advice we might add is to read the old as well as the new. Old writers (and yes, even dead writers) can teach us some new tricks.

With this thought in mind, we've collected 50 classic essays and speeches from such well-known British and American writers as Jonathan Swift, Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Orwell, Zora Neale Hurston, and Robert Benchley. Each is a "classic" in the sense that the writer's words live on both for what they have to say and for the way they say it. Here are just a few of the enduring essays in our collection:

• "Advice on the Choice of a Mistress," by Benjamin Franklin
  This Founding Father advises an acquaintance, "But if you will not take this counsel and persist in thinking a commerce with the sex inevitable, then I repeat my former advice, that in all your amours you should prefer old women to young ones."


• "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," by Zora Neale Hurston
  "Sometimes, I feel discriminated against," Hurston writes, "but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me."


• "Two Ways of Seeing a River," by Mark Twain
  In an excerpt from his memoir about growing up alongside the Mississippi River, Mark Twain considers what may be lost as well as gained through knowledge and experience.


• "Street Haunting: A London Adventure," by Virginia Woolf
  In this essay by English novelist Virginia Woolf, the quest to buy a pencil serves as an occasion to contrast "street sauntering," with its sense of carefree wandering, with "street haunting," which hints at the more disturbing aspects of walking in the city.


• "The Penalty of Death," by H.L. Mencken
  Consider how (and why) Mencken injects humor into his discussion of a grim subject.

Read, read, read these classic essays--and then, as Faulkner also advises, "write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window."

Image: William Faulkner (1897-1962)