Of Essays and Essayists

I STARTED to write the first “Foreword” to this series, now in its thirtieth year, I remember thinking
that it would be appropriate, perhaps necessary, to define what I meant by an essay. Here was a new
series of books calling attention to a genre that at the time the literary world did not take very seriously.
It was hard to forget that just a few years before we launched the series, America’s most renowned
essayist, E. B. White, acknowledged that “the essayist, unlike the novelist, the poet, and the playwright,
must be content in his self-imposed role of second-class citizen.” If, as White suggested, essays would
not win anyone a Nobel Prize, how substandard were they? What exactly was the literary production
that this new series would showcase and celebrate?

Thirty years later and I’m still asking myself that question. I think it’s clear that the status of the
essay has improved over that time (the longevity of this series being a part of the evidence), but a solid,
tight definition of the genre featured thus far throughout thirty volumes continues to elude me. I would,
of course, happily use another’s definition if I could find one I thought satisfactory. With so many
different types of essays being published year after year, it seems impossible to identify a few essential
features that characterize the genre and encompass all its forms. But perhaps one way into the matter
of definition is to ask not what essays are but what essayists.

What do they do differently from what the generally more respected writers in other genres do?
And where else to begin but with Michel de Montaigne?
It’s well known that the origin of the modern essay is usually traced to one writer who began
composing odd prose pieces in the 1570s. At first he had no literary category to describe what he was
doing, nor did he appear even to possess conventional rhetorical aims. In nearly all previous prose
compositions, the act of writing remained in the background; Montaigne is perhaps the first to
foreground the writing process. In his prose, he refused to adopt, as did his contemporaries, a
professional, scholarly, clerical, or judicial authority. He allowed himself no authoritative posture—only
that of being an author. As his pieces accumulated, Montaigne settled on the word essai to characterize
his literary efforts.
The word was an ordinary term that at the time had no literary resonance. Like most common
words, it carried a broad range of connotations. The etymology of essai can be traced to the late Latin
exagium, which meant to weigh or a weight. By the fourth century the term had spread to the Romance
languages with the additional and modern meaning of “to attempt” or “to try.” (For a fascinating
exploration of the word, see John Jeremiah Sullivan’s introduction to Essays 2014. Though we normally
translate the title of Montaigne’s book as Essays, suggesting only the genre, we should remember that in
his time the term suggested no literary genre and would be read as “attempts” or “trials,” or, since the
verb essayer had a wide spectrum of synonyms, it could also suggest to sample, taste, practice, take a
risk, to experiment, to improvise, to try out, to sound—and these are only a few ways we might
understand the term. As Hugo Friedrich says in his splendid study of Montaigne’s life and works, the
word also implied modest beginnings and a learner’s first attempts. The word essay, then, served as a
caution not to take the work too seriously; these weren’t, after all, airtight arguments or conclusive
treatises but represented a unique style of prose with an apparently unfinished quality.
Montaigne deliberately pursued an anti-systematic and anti-rhetorical method of composition. He
purposefully defied the formal conventions of classification, division, and logical progression that had

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long characterized serious prose. And he thus established an ironic authorial posture: the art of his
essays would be grounded in the illusion of their artlessness. His essays would reflect the mind in
process. The writer will not worry about main points and thesis statements, as digressions lead to
further digressions and his thematic destination disappears. A practicing Catholic, he doesn’t even try
to avoid the intellectual mortal sin of inconsistency. For Montaigne, the essay essentially came to
represent a compositional challenge to the established rhetorical order, as his fluid thoughts appear to
be generated solely from the act of writing and not from a preconceived plan. From this brief
description of Montaigne’s method we can see how far first-year college writing courses, with their
emphasis on clarity, coherence, and distinct rhetorical patterns, have distanced themselves from the
original meaning of an essay.
Back in the 1930s, the multitalented J. B. Priestley succinctly and amusingly claimed that an essay is
the kind of composition produced by an essayist. In that case, as so many writers have testified,
including Virginia Woolf and E. B. White, Montaigne can be regarded as the quintessential essayist:
skeptical, ironic, looking at a subject one way and then another while he forms a position that he will
undoubtedly qualify, if not completely undermine. Many readers today seem to appreciate writers who
aspire to be “subversive”—the word, like disruptive, has acquired a positive spin. But Montaigne
perfected a manner of self-subversion, and therein lies much of the quality of his intellectual liveliness
and enduring appeal, what Virginia Woolf called his “irrepressible vivacity.” She cites his own
description of his temperament: “bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate;
ingenious, heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant; liberal, covetous, and prodigal.”
Surely one of Montaigne’s great achievements consists of the magical way he unites his unique
compositional process with his infectious and mercurial personality. As he says in “Of Giving the Lie”: “I
have no more made my book than my book has made me—a book consubstantial with its author,
concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life.” He seems to want this notion of
consubstantiality to be read as more than a metaphor. At least one of Montaigne’s great students and
supporters appeared to take him literally. In his brilliant essay on Montaigne, Emerson writes: “The
sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. I know not anywhere the book that seems
less written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words, and they would
bleed; they are vascular and alive.”
If the origin of the essay as a genre is French, the origin of the essayist is English. As Jean
Starobinski, the author of what I consider the finest study of Montaigne (Montaigne in Motion), points
out, essayist had a “pejorative nuance” when first used around the beginning of the seventeenth century.
He cites the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson’s complaint: “Mere essayists, a few loose sentences, and
that’s all!” So we are back to White’s second-class citizens. From the experts of Montaigne’s day to the
specialists of ours—those whose work consists of original research, investigative fact-finding, and the
formation of incontestable arguments—essays may seem slight and the essayist superficial. Known as an
outstanding scholar, Starobinski admits that if someone declared him an essayist, he would feel “slightly
hurt” and “take it as a reproach.”
So the essayist appears to pursue a paradoxical career. The quintessential essayist parades an
enormous ego and yet does so in a modest setting, that is, within a genre widely acknowledged to be
unequal to fiction, poetry, and drama. E. B. White was very aware of this and felt the public somewhat
justified in regarding the essay as “the last resort of the egoist,” and said of himself, “I have always been
aware that I am by nature self-absorbed and egoistical; to write of myself to the extent I have done

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indicates a too great attention to my own life, not enough to the lives of others.” A few decades earlier,
the Saturday Review of Literature critic Elizabeth Drew argued more positively for the essayist’s ego,
regarding the “pure” or “perfect” essayist—writers such as Montaigne, Lamb, and Haz­litt—as someone
who possesses the “secret of the essayist,” which she termed “creative egotism” as distinguished from a
“trivial” egotism, which produces not great essays but recognizably mannered ones. Although she
doesn’t consider what I find paradoxical, Drew does recognize the peculiarity of major egos choosing to
express themselves in a minor form. But it may be that the essay is the only form suitable for such
expression.
You can teach someone many things about writing essays, but I wonder if you can teach anyone how
to be an essayist. An essayist at heart, I mean. It may be that just as there are born poets and born
storytellers, there are born essayists. This doesn’t mean that they discover their genre early; in fact, I
would guess that essayists recognize their special talents much later than do poets, novelists, and
playwrights, a recognition that comes perhaps only after attempting the other genres. Then, too, there
are the poets and novelists who also excel at essays and whose work frequently winds up in these books.
That is why the series is called The Best American Essays and not The Best American Essayists. But that is
a discussion for another time.
The Best American Essays features a selection of the year’s outstanding essays, essays of literary
achievement that show an awareness of craft and forcefulness of thought. Hundreds of essays are
gathered annually from a wide assortment of national and regional publications. These essays are then
screened, and approximately one hundred are turned over to a distinguished guest editor, who may add
a few personal discoveries and who makes the final selections. The list of notable essays appearing in
the back of the book is drawn from a final comprehensive list that includes not only all of the essays
submitted to the guest editor but also many that were not submitted.
To qualify for the volume, the essay must be a work of respectable literary quality, intended as a fully
developed, independent essay on a subject of general interest (not specialized scholarship), originally
written in English (or translated by the author) for publication in an American periodical during the
calendar year. Today’s essay is a highly flexible and shifting form, however, so these criteria are not
carved in stone.
Magazine editors who want to be sure their contributors will be considered each year should submit
issues or subscriptions to The Best American Essays, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 222 Berkeley Street,
Boston, MA 02116. Writers and editors are welcome to submit published essays from any American
periodical for consideration; unpublished work does not qualify for the series and cannot be reviewed
or evaluated. Also ineligible are essays that have been published in book form—such as a contribution to
a collection—but have never appeared in a periodical. All submissions must be directly from the
publication and not in manuscript or printout format. Editors of online magazines and literary bloggers
should not assume that appropriate work will be seen; they are invited to submit printed copies of the
essays to the address above. Please note: because of the increasing number of submissions from online
sources, material that does not include a full citation (name of publication, date, author contact
information, etc.) will no longer be considered.
As always, I appreciate all the assistance I regularly receive from my editor, Nicole Angeloro. I was
fortunate that Liz Duvall once again handled production. I appreciate, too, the assistance of Megan
Wilson, Mary Dalton-Hoffman, and Carla Gray. It was a pleasure to work this year with Ariel Levy, who
has put together an impressive collection of essays that vividly shows why the genre is so difficult to

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define. Readers will find here an engaging diversity of moods, voices, stances, and tones, but all with a
unifying spirit that reflects the special qualities of her own essays—the seamless dialogue of intimacy
and ideas, the creative convergence of public issues and personal identity.

R.A.