Favourite Essayists?

[Prometheus]

This topic hasn't been started before, as far as I know, so lets hear it then.

Who are your favourite essayists? Give examples of works you like, if possible.

[Lambert]

Martin Amis - The War Against Cliche
William H. Gass
William Hazlitt
James Wood - The Broken Estate
Orwell
Huxley
Samuel Johnson
Woolf
Eliot
Christopher Hitchens
Gore Vidal - United States
Hugh Kenner
Barthes
and many, many others...

[Mockingbird_z]

Woolf - yes!!! i agree
and perhaps Joseph Brodsky

[PeterL]

Twain
Swift
Poe
and damned few others

[Ryduce]

I can't really name a specific author in terms of an expansive body of work.

However,some of my most favorite essays include Camus' The Myth of Syshipus,Swift's A Modest Proposal,and Huxley's The Doors of Perception.

[lorii]

not directly linked in terms of authors, but more to the point of essay writing, when you're writing an essay for a school paper, can you integrate your own personal prose and style into the essay or must you stick to a set universal method?

[Kafka's Crow]

Charles Lamb's The Essays of Elia must be the most lovable body of works available in its genre. Read 'Dream Children: A Reverie' here: http://www.angelfire.com/nv/mf/elia1/dream.htm , the ending will make you cry.

Francis Bacon's Essays are a good example of Elizabethan English at its grandest. Who else could make such a brave claim 'I have wast contemplative ends for I have taken all knowledge to be my province.'

[ballb]

Virginia Woolfe
Montaigne
Salman Rushdie
Michael Foot
Francis Bacon
AJP Taylor

[Eric Cioe]

Teddy Roosevelt's Hunting the Grisly & Other Sketches.

Lorii - yeah, you can insert your own style. The basic form of a school essay is pretty good though - introduce your topic and position, argue it, respond to counterarguments, then conclude. That said, I don't think it needs to be 5 paragraphs.

[SirRaustusBear]

My favorites would be Orwell and Camus, with Gary Snyder coming in third. And Lorii my experience has been that high school teachers want you to write in a formulaic fashion: intro, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. In the real world that isn't really how you want to write so in writing beyond high school creativity is always good.

[Urizen]

Ralph Waldo Emerson

[JBI]

Goldsmith
Leigh Hunt
Lionel Trilling
Northrop Frye
Virginia Woolf
Montaigne
Harold Bloom
Charles Lamb
De Quincey
Jon Swift
Thomas Overbury
John Earle

Didn't go into much detail with 20th century ones.

[mortalterror]

If I had to pick favorites, I would have to say that Emerson exerted a strong influence on me during my teen years, and Montaigne has equally impressed me in more recent times.

Bacon wrote at about the same time as Montaigne, and while both are excellent, their styles could not be more dissimilar. For an example of concision choose Bacon. For sheer force of intellect, experience, and a personality which comes alive on the page, I'd choose Montaigne, however rambling and tangential his essays can be.

Other people have cited Harold Bloom, and while I do enjoy his work I would hesitate to list him alongside of the truly great essays of all time. Likewise, I feel that William Hazlitt's work is marred by an excess of romanticism that favors emotion to the detriment of the intellect, and subsequently his form suffers. Charles Lamb seems dry to me, and De Quincey while entertaining, is really only interesting (for me) because of his influence on Hunter S. Thompson.

I like Orwell's Shooting an Elephant, and A Hanging, but those are better examples of narrative than they are of the essay.

[JBI]

Oh, forgot Oscar Wilde.

[JCamilo]

Borges own them all. Not only because the majority of moderm critic seems to be spawned by his essays as he took the art of writing essays to a new level, they are crafted with precision and he seems to take Baudelaire Make poetry even in prose to Make poetry even in essays. To finish, his revolutionary way to write short stories are only because he transformed fiction in essays of fictional works.

I do not recall seeing here Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, Roland Barthez, Robert Louis Stevenson, Chesterton, Nabokov, all of them pretty good own their own.