essay writers in english literature

The Best Essayists of All Time 

Essays! Oh no! Not again! 

Worry not. Once you’ve finished formal education you are unlikely to have to write an essay , unless you want to.

That’s right, some people choose to write essays. The good news is that essays can be really entertaining and engaging: you may enjoy reading all the works mentioned in this article as we have chosen to focus on the ones that are the most fun and approachable! 

The best essay writers of all time are George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, Haruki Murakami, and Jonathan Swift. In their works you will find humor, humanity, intense wit, and arguments for the betterment of humankind. They’re great to read and nourish the mind and soul! 

What is an Essay?

Most of us had to read and write essays at school. The word still gives me the cold sweats. 

But what is an essay exactly? And what is not?

It’s pretty broad to be honest. The word essay was first used by Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592). He used the French word essayer, which means ‘to try’. He thought of what he had written as an attempt to get his thoughts on paper, or to make his argument. So an essay is an ‘attempt’! Sounds like a pretty accurate description of most of my high school papers. 

These days, essays are usually reasonably short. The sort of thing you could read in a single setting: otherwise they start to fall into other categories of writing. There are some longer essays, but they are the exception.

Two categories split the body of work. Formal essays are what we were taught to write in the education system. They have all the features associated with formal writing, like introduction + conclusion, and a logical argument that progresses and is substantiated throughout. 

Informal essays are thoughts and argument recorded in a way that is more personalised, and not as restricted by rules. The author is likely to write from a personal and perhaps intimate perspective, as though sharing a subjective position, rather than trying to position their arguments as objectively true. 

Why are Essays Popular?

It might be surprising to learn that essays are hugely popular , or it might not! 

Columns written by popular figures in the media fall under the definition of essays. Anywhere someone organizes their thoughts on the page for the purpose of communication with others comes close. So Carrie’s column in Sex and the City is probably an essay.

Essays can also have profound effects on the world politically, and immediate effects for individuals too. When we look at the essayists below we’ll go into more detail. 

Essays are popular because they convey important information to readers, often in a way that is highly accessible, or highly entertaining. 

Are Essays Important? 

Essays are very important. 

Essayists like Joan Didion help us to understand ourselves, and the society we live in.

Ideas and movements often begin as essays. Before an idea is turned into a law, it usually comes into the world in the form of an essay. This is one reason that universities remain a powerhouse of intellectual development. Movements like feminism often begin, or have their clearest enunciations, on university campuses partially because these institutions pump out thoughtful essays for the world to consider and debate.

Essays can also be very entertaining. Especially informal ones. The ability of the formal essay to entertain while offering information for consideration makes the form important and valued! 

Who Are the Best Essayists of All Time?

George orwell.

Orwell is one of the most celebrated essayists in the English language. Irving Howe has written that Orwell was “the best English essayist since Hazlitt, perhaps since Dr Johnson”.

He wrote on a wide variety of subjects, often commissioned by newspapers, and in this way was a very popular essayist. He wrote extensively about English culture, and Englishness. 

He also wrote highly influential political essays, and focussed on documenting international politics. 

He wrote about the use of language, and his essays on style are still influential. Here are his rules for good writing. 

• Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• Never use the passive where you can use the active.
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

He is famous for the lengths he went to to prepare his essays: for instance he tried to have himself incarcerated in order to write about prison. He also spent time ‘tramping’ up and down England with people who were without a home to learn more about financial struggles. 

Virginia Woolf

Woolf is a towering figure in the world of novels and essays. She is one of the leading figures in feminist thought, and regarded as one of the best novelists of all time. 

Her essays were highly influential in shaping feminist theory, especially A Room of One’s Own, which is based on a couple of Woolf’s lectures. She argues that an individual must have a room of one’s own, and sufficient money to survive, in order to write: these items have been denied to women .

She invents a character by the name of ‘Judith Shakespeare’ and uses this passage to demonstrate the way in which a sister of Shakespeare’s would not have had the opportunities available to Shakespeare.  

This essay has been adapted into many mediums, including some wonderful theatrical performances. 

Joan Didion

Once you read Joan Didion, you never forget it. She became a cultural phenomenon and is still popular and revered today. 

A phenom from the outset, she is considered one of the pioneers of ‘new journalism.’ She focussed particularly on 60s culture, Hollywood culture, and Californian culture more broadly. As Californian culture was so influential at that time, and is still to this day, her writing was of international interest.

Check out The Year of Magical Thinking, or Slouching Towards Bethlehem. 

Haruki Murakami

Murakami is a Japanese writer of international stature who has won an enormous number of awards primarily for his fiction . His work is engaged with Western culture to the extent that some in the Japanese literary establishment refer to him as un-Japanese. 

He has also contributed a number of highly influential essays. See ‘What I talk about when I talk about running’. In this work he discusses his relationship with marathon running: he has completed an ultra marathon – 100 kms! 

Jonathan Swift

It’s hard to accurately describe Swift’s influence on Western culture. The Encyclopædia Britannica describes him as the leading satirist in the English language … that’s impressive. There have been quite a few satirists in the English language.

Gulliver’s Travels is a hugely entertaining and satirical novel which pokes fun at all different types of people, big and small! 

He was a humanist and decried injustice wherever he spied it. For instance, he wrote an essay titled ‘A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland Being a Burden on Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick’. In this, as a joke, he proposes selling Irish children as food for the rich. While also dropping all sorts of hints about the types of reforms in Ireland which would actually make a difference to the lives of the Irish poor.   

So there you have it. The best essayists. You now know all you need to know to get started on a lifelong journey of essay reading, and potentially writing! Feel like you have something to say? Well, you probably do! Get it down on paper in the form of an essay: either a formal one, or a more informal one if you want to appeal to your reader on a personal level. We hope you enjoy reading the essays mentioned above, and go out seeking even more great writing to nourish your mind and heart.

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History's Greatest Essayists

Michel de Montaigne

George Orwell

G. K. Chesterton

Ralph Waldo Emerson

James Baldwin

Francis Bacon

Samuel Johnson

Joan Didion

Virginia Woolf

C. S. Lewis

Bertrand Russell

Aldous Huxley

Jonathan Swift

Charles Lamb

Leo Tolstoy

Christopher Hitchens

Jorge Luis Borges

Arthur Schopenhauer

Susan Sontag

T. S. Eliot

Benjamin Franklin

David Foster Wallace

Victor Hugo

E. B. White

William Hazlitt

Henry James

Yukio Mishima

Ralph Ellison

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Modern Essayists – List of the Greatest Essay Writers

The essayists of the early 20th century were known for their wide range of interests and their ability to write on diverse topics with eloquence, wit, and insight. Some of the most prominent essayists of this period included G.K. Chesterton, Hillarie Belloc, E.V. Lucas, A.G. Gardiner, Robert Lynd, and W.H. Hudson, who were all known for their distinctive voices and contributions to the art of the essay.

Among the essayists G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) ranks very high. His reputation as an essayist rests securely with Heretics. All Things Considered and Tremendous Trifles. His essays reveal an extraordinary range of mind. There was no subject on which he could not have found something original, and if possible challenging, to say, from the fundamental basis of the morals to the proper way of eating cheese. His style is eloquent, provocative, graphic and humorous.

Hillarie Belloc (1870-1953) is known for On Morning, On Something and Everything. As an essayist, his range is very wide. He is intimate and frank. E. V Lucas (1868-1938) wears the mantle of Elia. Some of his finest Essays are found in Character and Comedy, Old Lamps for New, Lotters Harvest and Cloud and Silver. His prose is lucid, pure and clear. He can be quaint, whimsical, personal and enticing.

A.G. Gardiner (1865-1946) known as the alpha of plough, was a prolific essayist of the school of Montaigne and lamb. His finest collection of essays are Pebbles on the Shore, Leaves in the Wind and Prophets, Priests, Kings. He is a personal essayist whose essays have a delightful and charming personality, a man with broad sympathies, enlightened mind and genial humour. His style is remarkable for the clarity of expression, opt choice of words, lively and genial humour and a wealth of literary and historical allusions. Robert Lynd (1879-1949), a delightful and prolific essayist, is remembered for his various collections of essays The Pleasure of Ignorance (1921), Selected Essays. The Little Angel, The Money Box. The Green Man. Dr. Johnson and Company W. H. Hudson (1841-1922), a critic and essayist, wrote The Purple Land That England Lost, A Crystal Age, The Naturalism in a La Plata and Far Away and Long Away.

Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) , a member of Bloomsbury Group, made remarkable contributions to the art of biography writing and essay writing. He is basically famous for his Eminent Victorians, Queen Victoria, Elizabeth and Essex and Portrait in Miniature.

TE Lawrence (1888-1935) known as the Lawrence of Arabia, is remembered for the Seven Pillars of Wisdom. JB Priestley, Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley enriched prose during this period and played a remarkable role in the development and growth of Modern English Essays.

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E.V. Lucas , on the other hand, was known for his clear and lucid prose, as well as his whimsical and personal style. Some of his most notable works include “Character and Comedy,” “Old Lamps for New,” and “Cloud and Silver,” which showcase his talent for writing essays that are both entertaining and insightful.

Robert Lynd , a prolific and delightful essayist, wrote on a wide range of topics, from the pleasures of ignorance to the mysteries of human nature. His collections of essays, such as “The Pleasure of Ignorance” and “Selected Essays,” continue to be studied and appreciated for their wit, humor, and insight.

W.H. Hudson , a critic and essayist, wrote on a range of topics, from the beauty of nature to the complexities of human society. His works, such as “The Purple Land That England Lost” and “Far Away and Long Ago,” were known for their poetic prose and keen observations of the natural world.

Finally, JB Priestley, Virginia Woolf, and Aldous Huxley were important essayists of the early 20th century, known for their contributions to modernist literature and their exploration of themes such as identity, society, and consciousness. Their works, such as Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” Priestley’s “English Journey,” and Huxley’s “Brave New World,” continue to be studied and appreciated for their thought-provoking ideas and innovative approaches to the essay form.

In conclusion , the essayists of the early 20th century were a diverse and talented group of writers who made significant contributions to the art of the essay. Their works continue to be studied and appreciated for their humor, insight, and eloquence, and their legacy remains an important part of the literary canon.

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What do a Renaissance-era French aristocrat, Benjamin Franklin, Martin Luther King Jr., and an English student have in common? They are all essayists! As the diverse members on this list suggest, "essayist" is a broad category that can include many different types of writers. Read on to find out the definition of an essayist, the different types of essayists, and…

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What do a Renaissance-era French aristocrat, Benjamin Franklin , Martin Luther King Jr., and an English student have in common? They are all essayists! As the diverse members on this list suggest, "essayist" is a broad category that can include many different types of writers. Read on to find out the definition of an essayist, the different types of essayists, and how some of the major essayists have contributed to this fascinating form of writing.

What is the Definition of an Essayist?

An essayist is a writer of short pieces of non-fiction that are either personal and autobiographical or formal and academic.

The word "essay" comes from the French assai, meaning to test or try. In a broad sense, an essayist is someone who 'tries' to explore a topic or argue a point using the written word. 2 The topics are usually non-fictional and may be related to the essayist's personal experience. The essay's limited scope means that essays are typically short (although there are exceptions!).

Did you know: The word 'assay' in chemistry shares the same etymology as "essay" but still carries the original French meaning.

Types of Essayists

Essays and essayists are notoriously hard to define, but they can usually be placed within two broad categories: personal or familiar and formal or critical .

Personal or Familiar Essayists

The essay originated as a way of writing about a variety of topics from a personal, autobiographical perspective. This type of essay has had an enormous influence on American and British literature for over 400 years. One or more of the following features can usually be attributed to essayists in the personal tradition: 4

• Flexible form - The personal essay could be structured around a narrative story (or stories), an argument, a certain object, person, event, thought, memory, etc. There is no limit to the ways in which a personal essay can be organized—or disorganized.
• First-person perspective - By definition, the personal essay is written from the author's perspective, so the first person pronouns "I" and "we" make frequent appearances.
• Conversational tone - Personal essays are often written in a friendly, approachable way that makes the reader feel like they were sitting down with the writer for a chat. As will be seen in the American essayist's section, there is also a close connection between the lecture, the speech, and the essay.
• Self-exploration - Personal essays are about their writers just as much as they are about the addressed topic. The essayist gives an account of themselves in the hope that their readers will be prompted to self-reflect in a similar fashion.
• Confessional, private, and honest tone - In discussing their innermost private lives, personal essayists hold nothing back and don't shy away from addressing sensitive or taboo topics such as sex, illness, death, bodily functions, and addiction.
• Humility - Relating to their confessional and first personal nature , personal essayists quickly admit the limitations of their experience, understanding, and perspective. Although these writers may be very knowledgeable, the purpose of personal essays is usually not to convince the reader with absolute certainty but to make their readers think and explore.
• Contrariness - Personal essayists often take a stance against popular opinion; this can range from serious political or social stances (on corporal punishment or euthanasia, for example) to seemingly unimportant things (such as popular music or travel). These writers are eager to give their readers new and fresh perspectives on various topics.
• Humor and irony - While personal essays are not usually purely comedic in intent, they often use of humor and irony. The strong rapport that writers develop with their readers is often reinforced in this way.

Formal or Critical Essayists

Formal or critical essays have had comparatively less influence in English and American literature. They are, however, a prominent form of academic writing and have had a major impact on political history. Formal essays in this tradition usually have one or more of the following features: 4

• Logical organization - Formal essays will be clearly and logically organized around a guiding argument (usually called a thesis statement) with evidence and argumentation directly supporting that thesis statement throughout the rest of the essay. Dividing an argument into sections on cause and effect or similarity and difference, for example, also fall under this category.
• Seriousness - Formal essays are more conservative in style and take serious social, political, scientific, artistic, or other academic topics as their subject matter. The use of humor or any kind of personal information from the author is rare.
• Objectivity - Formal essayists aim to convince their readers that what they say is true using objective standards of argumentation and evidence. They are more interested in giving objective proof (that is, proof that any person would accept) for their position than exploring human subjectivity. First-person pronouns will make only rare appearances in formal essays.

Note that, while this difference between personal and formal essays generally holds true, it is not always so easy to distinguish one from the other. You may, for example, find a writer using objective standards of argumentation and evidence in a personal essay. Given the many different forms that the personal essay can take, this variation is to be expected.

Famous Essayists

Let's look at some key essayists who have been influential in developing the essay genre, from its origins and the rise of the British essay to the essayists of today.

Origins of the Essay

The modern essay began in the late 16th century in France and England. 2,4

• Montaigne (1533-92) - Hugely influential and often considered the father of the modern personal essay (his 1580 book, Essais , was the first use of the word in its modern sense). By mixing his personal observations, emotions, and sensations with philosophy and quotations from classical Greek and Roman literature, Montaigne was able to write in a way that was at once disorganized and inconclusive but also deeply profound, searching, and unique.
• Francis Bacon (1561-1626) - An early scientist, writer, and pioneer of a more formal style of essay. In contrast to Montaigne, Bacon kept his writing impersonal and objective, aiming to convince his readers through evidence and argumentation.

The Rise of the British Essay

Taking their lead primarily from Montaigne, British essayists reached their peak in the 18th century with the rise of periodical newspapers and an increasingly literate public audience. 2,4

• Joseph Addison (1672-1719 ) and Richard Steele (1672-1729) - Publishing in their own newspapers, The Tatler (1709-11) and later The Spectator (1711-12), this legendary duo introduced the British public to a broad set of topics ranging from the comedic to the melancholy, from high art to descriptions of street life in 18th century London. Their writing was enormously influential in both England and America.
• Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) - The writer and poet Dr. Johnson is best known as the producer of the very first English dictionary, but he also published essays in his own newspapers, The Rambler (1750-52), The Adventurer (1753-54), and The Idler (1758-60). While taking inspiration from Addison and Steele, Johnson's essays tended to be a bit more serious and moralizing.
• Charles Lamb (1775-1834) - Charles Lamb was a clerk at the South-Sea House (and likely the inspiration for Melville's Bartleby). Lamb rubbed shoulders with the great poets of the Romantic era, such as Coleridge and Wordsworth. He wrote vaguely autobiographical essays under the pseudonym Elia that could be ironic and satirical or devastatingly confessional.
• Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) - While best known as a novelist, Woolf's feminist declaration in " A Room of One's Own " (1929), as well as the more existential " Street Haunting " (1927), and "The Death of a Moth " (1942) have all become classic essays.
• George Orwell (1903-1950) - Although he is better known as a novelist, Orwell was also a prolific essayist. His " Politics and the English Language " (1946) and " Shooting an Elephant " (1948) have become classics of the genre and provide further insight into the political themes found in his fiction.

The American Essay

The first essays published in colonial America typically resembled those published in England. After an explosion of political writing around the time of the Revolutionary War, the essay took a more philosophical and personal turn with the writings of the Transcendentalists. The personal essay flourished in 19th and 20th century America and often took political undertones, dealing directly or indirectly with issues of race, gender, and class. 2,4

• Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) - Franklin famously made his fortune in the printing and publishing industry. Inspired by the wit and humor of Addison and Steele, he wrote essays chock full of proverbs, irony, and humor under pseudonyms such as Silence Do-Good, The Busy-Body, and Richard Saunders (also known as Poor Richard of Poor Richard's Almanack fame).
• Thomas Paine (1737-1809) - An Englishman by birth, Paine was a writer who published a number of political essays in pamphlet form, particularly in America. The most famous of these, " Common Sense " (1775-76), argued forcefully against the British monarchy and for the American Revolutionary cause.
• Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804), James Madison (1751-1836), and John Jay ( 1745-1829 ) - These three statesmen worked together, publishing anonymously as a single writer called Publius, to produce a series of political essays that would come to be known as The Federalist Papers . These essays went on to significantly impact the drafting and approval of the U.S. constitution.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) - Emerson was a popular intellectual, poet, and one of the founders of the literary and philosophical movement known as Transcendentalism . He was a sought-after speaker in both Europe and the United States, and his popular lectures such as " Nature " (1836), " The American Scholar" (1837), " Self-Reliance " (1841), and "Experience" (1844) were all published in widely-read collections of his essays.
• Henry David Thoreau (1817-62) - A reluctant disciple of Emerson, Thoreau was also a sought-after lecturer and popular writer. While most of his writing is concerned with humanity's relation to nature, he is also famous for his political essays such as " Civil Disobedience " (1849) and "Slavery in Massachusetts" (1854).
• Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-68) - A legendary Civil Rights leader also known for his speeches and essays, most notably "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (1963). Echoing Thoreau's " Civil Disobedience ," King argued forcefully for the necessity of non-violent street protests in the struggle for Civil Rights in this open letter.
• James Baldwin (1924-87) - Often considered the greatest American personal essayist of the 20th century, Baldwin's autobiographical essays collected in books such as Notes of a Native Son (1955) and The Fire Next Time (1963) directly confront his experiences with racism in the United States.
• Susan Sontag (1933-2004) - Sontag began her career writing as an art critic with "Notes on 'Camp'" (1964), and her essays on philosophical and artistic topics went on to become some of the most widely read and discussed formal essays of recent decades.
• Joan Didion (1934-2021) - Also a famous novelist, Didion was at the forefront of the revival of the personal essay in the late 20th century, capturing the hedonistic and fragmented atmosphere of life in suburban California.

Contemporary Essayists

The essay writing tradition is alive and well, especially in the United States. An incomplete list of important contemporary essayists, most of whom are still alive and actively publishing, includes:

• Christopher Hitchens
• Michael Pollan
• David Sedaris
• Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Marilynne Robinson
• John D'Agata
• Rebecca Solnit
• Rahawa Haile

Essayists - Key takeaways

• The modern essay dates back to the late 16th century writings of Montaigne and Bacon.
• There are two types of essays : personal or familiar and formal or critical.
• Personal essays usually present a loose exploration of a topic through the essayist's own experience.
• Formal essays are tightly organized and aim to convince their readers.
• A large number of essayists have made important contributions to both British and American literature and history.

1 N. Baym. The Norton Anthology of American Literature , vol. B 1820-1865, 2007.

2 J. A. Cuddon. Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory , 1999.

3 S. Greenblatt. The Norton Anthology of English Literature , vol. 1, 2012.

4 P. Lopate. The Art of the Personal Essay , 1995.

Frequently Asked Questions about Essayists

--> what is the meaning of the word "essayist".

An essayist is the author of a short work of non-fiction, usually either personal in nature or argumentative.

--> What is an example of an essayist?

Famous essayists include Montaigne, Bacon, Addison and Steele, Charles Lamb, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, to name just a few. 

--> What are the types of essayists?

There are two broad types of essayists: formal and informal. Informal essayists write autobiographically, with loose organization, and on familiar terms with the reader. Formal essayists write highly organized, objective pieces using high standards of argumentation and evidence.

--> What are the characteristics of essayists?

Informal essayists write with open form in the first person, maintaining a conversational tone and making use of devices such as humor, irony, confession, contrariness, and self-exploration. Formal essayists, on the other hand, are characterized by their use of logical organization, seriousness, and objectivity.

--> Who are modern essayists?

Here is an incomplete list of modern essayists, most of whom are still actively writing: David Foster Wallace, Michael Pollan, David Sedaris, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Marilynne Robinson, John D'Agata, Rebecca Solnit, Ross Gay, Zadie Smith, and Rahawa Haile

Final Essayists Quiz

Essayists quiz - teste dein wissen.

What type of essay has had more influence in literature?

Show answer

The personal/informal essay

Show question

What type of essay has been more influential in politics and academia?

The formal essay

Which of the following is a characteristic of the personal essay?

It is conversational

Which of the following is a characteristic of the formal essay?

It is organized around a central argument or thesis statement

Who is generally considered to be the father of the modern personal essay?

Which pair below were influential British essayists of the early 18th century?

Addison and Steele

Are essays usually fictional or non-fictional?

Non-fictional

Which famous essayist below was also an American Civil Rights leader?

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Which essayist below is most famous as a novelist?

Self-exploration

Which famous essayist produced the first English dictionary?

Samuel Johnson

Which essayist likely had the most influence on Martin Luther King, Jr.?

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Best American Essay Writers of All Time

They say that there are the writers a separate universe in which they can produce, create their work. An ordinary person is not given the opportunity to know the deep writer’s life, but even every day we see a new crowd of people who stand in line for a new book. Everyone expects a miracle, take a new book with the hope that something wonderful, inexplicably beautiful, willing to drown in a completely different world, a world of fantasies and dreams, which appears to the reader in the next bought book in the various forms: essays, novels, stories, poem.

Today we are going to talk about the famous top essay writers . ESSAY (fran. Essai) it is the literary form of small prose text, which express emphasize the author’s individuality. In relief, to the story, the writer’s essay’s facility is to communicate or interpret, but not ever a picture or a histrionic retelling of any life position. The work reaches its purpose through the outright copyright approvals, which do not take the perpetration of no one fictional personage or the plot of a binder. Nevertheless, there is not any hardly absolute difference between different  types of essays and short stories. The main essay’s feature is its brevity, it usually takes from ten up to twenty pages.

There are a great amount of interesting, fascinating works, essays, literary works, which were written by the great world famous authors and writers. More than three centuries ago, the first essay was published at first. Now, we can find a lot of essays in libraries or have an easy possibility to order by the Internet miscellanea of works written by well-known authors from all the world from different centuries. Ever since ancient times, essays were published in magazines, books, were grouped by theme, genre, years, and the authors. Details included a variety of genres, among which are comedy, non-fiction, romance, instructive, historical facts, life stories, and current events. There are many authors and essays (detailed list you can read below), and it was difficult to identify the most important and well-known essayists of all time.

The list, about which I have mentioned earlier, includes writers from different backgrounds and periods of history. Some of they are still currently continuing to write. Because this fact, it is nothing surprising in the fact that essay remains a popular literary format. And the authors, who can quickly, briefly, concisely and interesting tell the story will always be on top. Edusson, the custom essay writing service company, selected essayists, but not essays. Because, the best essays are only personal, authorial and deep engaged with author’s issues, internal feelings and ideas.

James Baldwin (1924-1987)

Baldwin grew up in a family of his stepfather, a priest, where he was the eldest of nine children. His own father, Baldwin have never known and was very suffered from that, which was reflected in some of his works (“Tell me when the train left”, “Go Tell it on the Mountain”, “Giovanni’s Room” and others. After Bronx high school graduating, Baldwin moved to Greenwich Village, where he began his literary career.

Greenwich Village has always been considered one of the most deprived New York areas, caused a wave of optimism in Baldwin’s source, who started to write about his views and understandings of what is happening around him. His first journalistic articles, essays were imbued with the spirit of racism denial which was prevailing in America at that times. That negative attitude makes young writer move Paris.

Baldwin felt like he caught a breath of fresh air in France, have been saving there from the racist and homophobic America of 40-th. XX century. His main works were written on the banks of the Seine, and there Baldwin have spent the most of his life, producing his creations among which are next well-known essays:

• James Baldwin and his popular essays published in 1956 “Notes of a Native Son” essays;
• James Baldwin and his book of interesting essays named  “The Devil Finds Work” which was presented to the mass in 1976;
• James Baldwin and his “The Evidence of Things Not Seen” (essays; 1985);
• James Baldwin and his list of essays created in the romantic atmosphere of 85th with the strange name “The Price of the Ticket”;

Norman Mailer (1923-2007)

Norman Mailer was born in New Jersey in the Jewish immigrants family. He was the first child in the family, and after him, there was also two children – a brother and sister. Norman grew up in New York, and in 1939 decided to become a student of Harvard university, where he have fallen in love with literary activity. His first story was published at the age of 18, in 1941. The University of Harvard received young author the university magazine award. Among the entire set of his works we would like to highlight the most famous essays:

• Norman Mailer and his New York book of essays called in the world as “The Presidential Papers”;
• Norman Mailer and his second New York creation which is known by the loud name “Cannibals and Christians”;
• Norman Mailer and his “Pieces and Pontifications” in which the author opens the deep world of Little Boston’s Life.

Susan Sontag (1933-2004)

Susan Sontag was born in New York, 16 January 1933 year. Since her childhood, the friends of hers were always only booked. In 1952 Sontag’s family have moved to Boston where Sontag passed entry exams to Harvard University. There young writer studied English literature and received a Master of Philosophy in 1954.

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While have been studying at Oxford in 1955-1957, she has faced with the sexism challenge, and because of this soon moved to Paris. From that time she was actively engaged in the French cinema, philosophy and wrote a lot. Among her essay collection we can emphasize the nest ones: “Against Interpretation”, “Where the Stress Falls”, “Regarding the Pain of Others Styles of Radical Will”.

Joan Didion (1934-present)

Joan Didion was born and grew up in Sacramento, California. She was just a five-year-old little girl when she have begun to write her first string. She read everything she could get into her hands while the parents were not home. In 1956, she graduated from the University of Berkeley and got their Bachelor Degree in Arts and English language. Within her senior years, Joan won the first place in an essay writing inworld-known Vogue magazine. She created own first work which was named “Run” and issued in 1963 has been working there in Vogue. Among her essays work we want to mention the next ones:

• Joan Didion and her “Joan Didion” essays works;
• Joan Didion and her “Salvador”;
• Joan Didion and her essays about Earth planet called “After Henry” (twelve geographical essays);

Annie Dillard (1945-present)

Annie Dillard was born in 1945 and is already alive to present us a lot of her magnificent works. Anni is an American author. She was always well-known for her clear story prose in both nonfiction/fiction, poetry, essays, literary criticism and etc. Among her essays Edusson want to emphasize the next ones:

• “Education stone”, the book of short nonfiction essays;
• “Life on the rocks”, the book of 14 essays: Total Eclipse, In the Jungle, The Deer at Providencia, A Field of Silence, On a Hill Far Away, God in the Doorway, Mirage’s, Aces and Eights);

Robert Atwan (1940- present)

Robert Atwan was born in 1940, November 2, in New Jersey. He graduated from 2 universities: Seton Hall and Rutgers. He is known as one of the best American essay writers. Among the entire set of his works we highlighted the most famous ones:

• “Great Moments in Literary Baseball”, on the basis of the first game of the season;
• “Poems and Essays”, essays about Autumn and Winter (Snowy essays);

Edward Hoagland (1932- present)

Edward Hoagland is an American writer, who was born in 1932, in New York. Since his childhood, he was fond of writing, literature and from that time, he decided to become a novelist, essayist. He has a huge number of essays, the whole list of which you can find here, and we will mention in our article just a little part of it:

• “The Big Cats”, written in 1961;
• “Why this Extra Violence” in April;
• “The Soul of the Tiger” written when he has fallen in love for the first time;
• “Big Frog, Very Small Pond”, unknown data;
• “A World Worth Saving and Christmas Observed”, written in 1989;
• “Two Kinds of People” which was published just in Europe;
• “Last Call”, 2010, a very interesting one;
• “On Friendship”, which he wrote in 2013, when he was already a deep old man.

David Foster Wallace (1962-2008)

David Foster Wallace was born in 1968 in the USA.He has graduated the little-known college, where he studied philosophy, there got a degree in English language and literature. For many years, he experienced severe bouts of depression. in June 2007, according to the doctor recommendations David stopped taking medication. Depression particularly increased  In the last months of his life. On September 12, 2008, he committed suicide.There some of this essays:

• David Foster and his essay “Television and U.S. Fiction”, (an interesting and comic essays book);
• David Foster and his essays book named “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley”;
• David Foster and his “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” and “Consider the Lobster”, which were both published in 2005;
• David Foster and his “Both Flesh and Not” unknown date of publication.

So we see, that the concept  “essay” goes beyond the simple students essays writing in college. Famous American essay writers of the 20th century have revolutionized the way we think and write. They have become almost mythical figures in the world of literature, with their works inspiring many to write and express their thoughts. In the modern day, there are now many platforms that allow you to edit a paper online , offering a variety of tools to help hone your writing and make it shine. Whether you’re looking to follow in the footsteps of these legendary authors or simply looking to improve on your writing expression and maybe one day you will have the chance to become a popular essayist too.

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How These Famous Essay Writers Can Make You Awesome

Last updated: June 2019

“The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” – Mark Twain

For Mr. Twain, essays were way more than academic assignments most of you love hating so much. His works inspired ideas and motivated people to change the world.

Have you ever thought how famous essay writers could influence you? To be specific, how could their writings make you awesome?

Table of Contents:

Early American and Colonial Period: Before 1776

Democratic origins and revolutionary writers: 1776-1820, romantic period: 1820–1860, the rise of realism: 1860-1914, modernism and experimentation: 1914-1945, american essay writers of postwar period, american essayists: present days.

• The final words

Here’s the deal:

• Essay writers cover historical facts and events.
• They reveal peculiar details about those facts and events, which helps readers understand past and present better.
• And their essays serve well to students who need reliable information sources as references for their academic papers.

The writing profession is among the most ancient ones. Great essay writers have been working since the dawn of history, with each period celebrating new names and their signature roles in the evolution of a language.

Year by year, essay writers teach critical thinking and freedom of expression to young people demanding changes and self-development. Words are their weapon, powerful enough to influence your attitude toward writing in general, and your writing assignments in particular.

Read these famous American essay writers, and you’ll reveal the secret of awesomeness: clear thoughts expressed with power words. The main thing to remember is that well written essays will help you understand the topic and write your research paper.

The more you read, the better you write , after all.

It was the time of revolutionary spirit in the air. No surprise, all essay writers of that time strove to send it over their works.

Key topics of their essays were:

• Unjust laws
• Slavery and fights against it
• Criticism of government with their policy
• Disagreements with aristocrats
• Warnings of implications such global changes might have

It was the time of revolutionary literature. If your professor asks to write essays on corresponding topics , you might refer to works of the following American essayists:

• Samuel Sewall (1652-1730): The Selling of Joseph
• John Woolman (1720-1772): Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes

The triumph of independence influenced moods and literature then. Essays by famous authors described antislavery, faltering steps of democracy, American exceptionalism, the Constitution, American generations, and relations between England and America.

Refer to their works in your essays when appropriate. Those men of letters had to pay for publishing, so they did best for their writings to be topical, informative, and original.

The famous essay writers of that time:

• Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790): Advice on the Choice of a Mistress; The Art of Procuring Pleasant Dreams; The Temple of Learning; and The Whistle
• Thomas Paine (1737-1809): Common Sense and The American Crisis
• Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826): The Declaration of Independence
• Washington Irving (1783-1859): The Mutability of Literature

Known as American Renaissance, this was the era of self-expression, inspiration, and a significant role of arts for both social and individual growth.

The Romantic movement originated in Germany but spread to other European countries, England and France in particular. Essay writers of that time were poets and fiction authors as well, with the core topic of self-development. They talked about arts, self-awareness, the unity of self and nature, and a human mission in this world.

We bet you know their names. Some of the famous essay writers then were:

• Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882): Gifts; Self-Reliance; and The Poet
• Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849): The Philosophy of Furniture
• Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809-1894): The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table
• Margaret Fuller (1810-1850): Papers on Literature and Art
• Frederick Douglass (1818-1895): The Destiny of Colored Americans
• Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906): On Women’s Right to Vote
• Donald Grant Mitchell (1822-1908): My Farm of Edgewood: A Country Book

The stark reality of life: Romantic moods can’t take ages. 1860 was the year of realism’s return and heyday. The U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) assigned topics to famous essay writers of that time, and it was the period when optimism had given its way to exhaustion.

America transformed into a powerful nation then. People knew quotes from famous writers by heart, as their words resonated with contemporary moods, and they knew how to write an essay that would work.

American essayists covered such topics as wars, industrialization, urbanization, alienation, individual and national strengths. The most known names of that time are:

• A. Bronson Alcott (1799-1888): “Exercise” essay collection Table-Talk
• Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888): Death of a Soldier
• Mark Twain (1835-1910): Advice to Youth; The Danger of Lying in Bed; and On the Decay of the Art of Lying
• Henry Adams (1838-1918): A Law of Acceleration
• Mary Hunter Austin (1868-1934): The Land of Little Rain
• W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963): Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others

“You are all a lost generation.” – Gertrude Stein

These words of the well-known novelist and art collector define writers of that time in the best way possible.

Disillusioned with wars and life values they had, Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and other best-known representatives of their generation hated aristocrats and craved for recognition. Needless to say, they expressed such moods in writings.

The Great Depression (1929-1939) had an impact on young essayists, too. They experimented with writing techniques, expressed their thoughts in tricky yet meaningful ways, and tried to cut through the clutter of their peers.

Read works of these famous essay writers and learn from them if you want to polish writing skills and create A+ academic papers.

• George Ade (1866-1944): Luxuries
• Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956): The Libido for the Ugly
• T. S. Eliot (1888-1965): Selected Essays, 1917–1932
• Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980): The Days Before
• F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940): What I Think and Feel at 25
• William Faulkner (1897-1962): The Sound and the Fury
• Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961): The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Essay writers of 1945-1990 engaged in self-reflection thrice. They observed, described, and commented on everything that was going on around. Writings of that time are of a big value today, as they help us understand life models and moods of postwar Americans. Everyone uses the best essay written to create their best research papers.

A hallmark of the period was verbal genres’ emerging and boom. Essayists wrote speeches, movie scripts, and song lyrics to describe and express public sentiments better. Influenced by Latin American realism and European existentialism, postwar literature was much multifaceted. Historical figures such as Nelson Mandela with his writings provided American essayists with food for thoughts too.

Who are the writers able to influence your mindset and help you understand the outside world through the lens of historical events?

• Norman Mailer (1923-2007): The White Negro
• John McPhee (1931-present): The Search for Marvin Gardens
• Edward Hoagland (1932-present): Heaven and Nature
• Wendell Berry (1934-present): Against the Death Penalty
• Joan Didion (1934-present): The White Album
• Joseph Epstein (1937-present): Plausible Prejudices: Essays on American Writing; A Literary Education and Other Essays; and Masters of the Games: Essays and Stories on Sport
• Robert Lee Fulghum (1937-present): All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

Want to hop under the covers?

Here comes the comprehensive list of famous essay writers’ best works for you to read, learn, and refer in your college assignments.

They challenge predecessors’ ideas, adapting them to our quick-changing world. Contemporary essay writers cover topics such as human rights, gender equality, post-feminism, global urbanization, and other social issues. Great english essays are sure to help you scoop up good new ideas.

The Internet era influences writing forms and styles. Since people have no time and desire to read and analyze long manuscripts today, most essayists go online and publish short stories to hold the attention of an audience. Some communicate ideas through social media or video, as it’s the best way to reach Gen Z.

Who are the most famous essay writers now?

• Marilynne Robinson (1943-present): When I Was a Child I Read Books
• Stephen Edwin King (1947-present): Great Hookers I Have Known
• David Shields (1956-present): Reality Hunger
• Sarah Vowell (1969-present): The Partly Cloudy Patriot
• John Jeremiah Sullivan (1974-present): Pulphead

(Here is the list of ten contemporary American essayists to read right now.)

The final words:

As you see, essay writing goes beyond college assignments. This literary form allows you to look back, rethink historical events and social heritage, understand the surrounding community better, and develop critical thinking.

Reading and analyzing the best works of famous essay writers, you will not only become higher-ed but also learn how to influence others with your words and writings. Try to use the best english essays as examples and you are sure to be successful!

Isn’t it awesome?

Let Bid4Papers help you write your best essay today – become the writing influencer tomorrow!

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6 thoughts on “ how these famous essay writers can make you awesome ”.

I’ve figured out some interesting insights through your blog post. Another subject I would like to see here is the games designed specifically for preschool age kids. Focused on familiarization as opposed to memorization, they could makes children occupied without having the experience like they are studying. Any ideas? Maybe you could write a blog post in this topic?

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Good post! Don’t you mind us linking to it at our website? Keep up the great writing.

Thank you, Roland!

Sure, feel free to share 🙂

Cheers, Lesley

That was so good, thanks for sharing!

Writing is one of the oldest professions. Since the dawn of time, great essay writers have been at work, with each epoch commemorating new names and their distinctive contributions to the advancement of a language.

Essayists promote critical thinking and freedom of expression to young people seeking change and self-development year after year. Their weapon is words, which have the power to change your perspective about writing in general and your writing responsibilities in particular.

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The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade

Ever tried. ever failed. no matter..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Oliver sacks, the mind’s eye (2010).

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In The Mind’s Eye , Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death), Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by one of the great storytellers of our era.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published primarily in GQ , but also in The Paris Review , and Harper’s —was the only full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and probably one of the only full books of essays they had even heard of.

Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming of One Tree Hill , the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out , what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare. This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things: it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most painful essay I have ever read.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass , Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in relationship to other species. Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters, which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.”  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Hilton Als, White Girls (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls , which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-length essay, The Women , a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture.  –John Freeman, Executive Editor

Eula Biss, On Immunity (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity . As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief 

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior, spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.) The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker , Moira Donegan suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay  Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions  was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel  Lost Children Archive  (a fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a  good  conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment.  Tell Me How It Ends  is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free , Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit premise -y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill. Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby in her review of the collection in The New Republic . “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves.”  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing  Bad Feminist  that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book , the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young Monster (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell.  This Young Monster  (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from  Artforum ,  Dazed & Confused , and  Time Out. It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic,  This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM-5 )’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The Book of Delights , which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything .”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) ·  Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012)  · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014)  · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014)  · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches (2014)  · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015) ·  Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016)  · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016)  · Lindy West, Shrill (2016)  · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016)  · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016)  · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016)  · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016)  · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017)  · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017)  · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017)  · J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017)  · Louise Glück, American Originality (2017)  · Joan Didion, South and West (2017)  · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017)  · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017)  · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017)  ·  Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017)  · Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018)  · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018)  · Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018)  · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018)  · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am (2018)  · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018)  · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019)  · Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019)  · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019)  · Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019)  · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019)  ·  Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019)  · Robert A. Caro,  Working  (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

Emily Temple

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