Essay

:For the town in France, see Essay, Orne.

The essay as literary genre

The word essay derives from the French essai ('attempt'), from the verb essayer, 'to try' or 'to attempt'. By the same token, the first author to describe his works as essays was French: Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592). Inspired in particular by the works of Plutarch, a translation of whose Oeuvres morales into French had just been published by Jacques Amyot, Montaigne began to compose his essays in 1572; the first edition, entitled Essais, was published in two volumes in 1580. For the rest of his life he continued to revise previously published essays as well as composing new ones.

Related Topics:
Michel de Montaigne - Plutarch - Jacques Amyot - 1572 - 1580

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Francis Bacon's essays, published in book form in 1597, 1612, and 1625, were the first works in English that described themselves as essays. Ben Jonson first used the word essayist in English in 1609, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Related Topics:
Francis Bacon - 1597 - 1612 - 1625 - Ben Jonson - 1609 - Oxford English Dictionary

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Notable essayists are legion. They include Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walter Bagehot, George Orwell, and E.B. White.

Related Topics:
Joseph Addison - Richard Steele - Charles Lamb - William Hazlitt - Thomas Babington Macaulay - Ralph Waldo Emerson - Walter Bagehot - George Orwell - E.B. White

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It is very difficult to define the genre of essay, but the following remarks by Aldous Huxley, regarded in his day as a leading practitioner of the genre, may be of interest:

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"Like the novel, the essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything. By tradition, almost by definition, the essay is a short piece, and it is therefore impossible to give all things full play within the limits of a single essay. But a collection of essays can cover almost as much ground, and cover it almost as thoroughly, as can a long novel. Montaigne's Third Book is the equivalent, very nearly, of a good slice of the Comédie Humaine. Essays belong to a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively within a three-poled frame of reference. There is the pole of the personal and the autobiographical; there is the pole of the objective, the factual, the concrete-particular; and there is the pole of the abstract-universal. Most essayists are at home and at their best in the neighborhood of only one of the essay's three poles, or at the most only in the neighborhood of two of them. There are the predominantly personal essayists, who write fragments of reflective autobiography and who look at the world through the keyhole of anecdote and description. There are the predominantly objective essayists who do not speak directly of themselves, but turn their attention outward to some literary or scientific or political theme. . . . And how splendid, how truly oracular are the utterances of the great generalizers! . . . The most richly satisfying essays are those which make the best not of one, not of two, but of all the three worlds in which it is possible for the essay to exist" (Collected Essays, "Preface").

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