The Great Essayists

[Max Ernst]

I am curious to know who the great essayists are. All I know is Francis Bacon and de montaigne.

[Pike Bishop]

Samuel Johnson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Matthew Arnold
Mikhail Bakhtin
James Baldwin
Virginia Woolf
E.B. White
Percy Shelley
Jacques Derrida
Roland Barthes
Clarice Lispector
Georges Bataille
Julia Kristeva
Helene Cixous
Umberto Eco
Thomas Merton
Lionel Trilling
Harold Bloom
Paul De Man

That should be a nice group with which to start.

[ennison]

It's a wide field: I don't know much about some of the writers mentioned above but I'd add Orwell, Hazlitt, Kenneth Macleod, Gore Vidal, Virgilia Peterson, Macphee, Shaw Grant, Dillard, Lamb, David Wallace, Martin, and there are numerous others.

[lichtrausch]

Yukichi Fukuzawa
Christopher Hitchens

[Iain Sparrow]

Yukichi Fukuzawa
Christopher Hitchens

Hitchens was amazing.

[Poetaster]

Adding: George Orwell, E.A. Housman, JRR Tolkien, Borges, Dante, Hazlitt.

[ajvenigalla]

J. R. R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Leo Tolstoy, G.K. Chesterton, Harold Bloom, H.L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, Murray Rothbard, James Wood, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, David Foster Wallace, George Orwell, Norman Mailer — all these are some of the great essayists of all time. Lucid and brilliant writing, insightful commentary on relevant topics, wonderful and thought-provoking, if not always agreeable and often controversial, all these things make these people great essayists and great writers in general. Others include Marilynne Robinson, Dan Sanchez, Robert Higgs, Jeffrey Tucker, and Francine Prose.

Here's a link to Dan Sanchez, one of my own favorite essayists: http://www.dansanchez.me/

[ennison]

I'm glad to see Chesterton on the list above. No list would be complete without him. No one seems to have mentioned Addison. When I was young my uncle used to read Litrichean Alasdair Mor aloud to us in the kitchen. These were very entertaining essays. The essayist can write in any way he/ she likes. It can be humorous or ascerbic, educational or didactic personal or socially aware, political or ephemerally light-hearted. Agnes Repplier was an American essayist of great charm. Some journalists write as if they are essayists. Matthew Parris (I share none of his politics) is a good writer. Giles Coren is reliably scathing and funny. Allan Massie writes well (I don't share his politics either) Robert Fisk sometimes writes quite well. Yasmin alibhai-brown has the makings of a good essayist. The dead ex-trot I don't rate at all.

[Pike Bishop]

While I am a fan of Chesterton, I wouldn't say he, or any essayist, is a must-have for any list. There are just too many excellent essayists and standards for those essayists for such a pre-requisite. Also, many prefer their essayists to be non-religious, so Chesterton, Addison, and Lewis just don't do it for them. I, myself, prefer the aesthetic and theoretical, so a list withou Derrida, De Man, and Arnold is beyond me.

[WICKES]

Bertrand Russell: profoundly intelligent, deeply humane, a vast range of knowledge, humorous, clear, precise and usually correct!

Aldous Huxley: a polymath who can range about from one subject to another, he is equally at home discussing quantum theory and the poetry of Milton. Elegant, witty, urbane, a product of the finest education Edwardian England had to offer, and boy does it show.

George Orwell: arguably the best essayist of the 20th century and my personal favourite.

C S Lewis: very, very underrated. His literary criticism and general essays are superb and he has a prose style to die for.

Oscar Wilde: witty and learned

Gore Vidal

William Hazlitt: many would argue he was the greatest essayist of the 19th century

Stephen Jay Gould: a scientist, but unlike Dawkins a man with an open mind and a vast range of knowledge about the world beyond scientific facts. Like Huxley he was a polymath.

Robert Graves: like C S Lewis he is underrated, but the man had lived an interesting life and was very knowledgeable. He also had a crazy, loopy edge to him, though was often astonishingly perceptive in spite of (or perhaps because of) his craziness. A bit like Coleridge.

[lichtrausch]

Also, Carl Sagan.

[Pike Bishop]

Other great genre essayists:

Art:
Clement Greenberg
Frank O'Hara
Charles Baudelaire

Sports and Recreation:
David Halberstam
Frank DeFord
Jon Krakauer

Rock and Pop Music:
Greil Marcus
Robert Christgau
Josh Kun

Film:
Paul Schrader
Pauline Kael
David Bordwell
Kaja Silverman

[Iain Sparrow]

Stephen Jay Gould: a scientist, but unlike Dawkins a man with an open mind and a vast range of knowledge about the world beyond scientific facts. Like Huxley he was a polymath.

What!?
Gould, "a man with an open mind and a vast range of knowledge about the world beyond scientific facts", what does that even mean? The first definition of 'knowledge', is FACTS. I had the misfortune to read Gould's book, Rock of Ages, where he tries to square Science & Religion. That goes far beyond open-mindedness, and enters the realm of apologist, which he was. Dawkins simply calls a spade, a spade.

[Pierre Menard]

Most of the great ones have been mentioned:

Montaigne and Samuel Johnson are both brilliant.
Borges' essays are just as good as his stories and can truly broaden your conceptions of literature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great American sage.
And there's been lot's of other great essayists mentioned too.

I'll recommend one that hasn't been mentioned yet, William H. Gass, who is a wonderful essayist, and a fine prose writer.

[Pike Bishop]

What!?
Gould, "a man with an open mind and a vast range of knowledge about the world beyond scientific facts", what does that even mean? The first definition of 'knowledge', is FACTS. I had the misfortune to read Gould's book, Rock of Ages, where he tries to square Science & Religion. That goes far beyond open-mindedness, and enters the realm of apologist, which he was. Dawkins simply calls a spade, a spade.

You might want to try excerpts from Gould's Punctuated Equilibrium, where he addresses flawed versions of Evolution and how they operate in a similar mode to Kuhn in Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Also, while Dawkins is certainly a smart man, I'm sure you can't approve of all of his statements about Muslims and Western Feminists; they are a bit troubling.

[lichtrausch]

Also, while Dawkins is certainly a smart man, I'm sure you can't approve of all of his statements about Muslims and Western Feminists; they are a bit troubling.
For example?

[Pike Bishop]

In his "Dear Muslima" "essay"--which I cannot re-print here because of content--Dawkins told Western feminists they shouldn't complain about sexual harassment, patriarchy, or our present rape culture because they don't have it as bad as Muslim women. Of course, many women, including female atheists, were justifiably incensed. Dawkins himself realized it was horrid and apologized.

As to his Islamophobia, he has railed off random tweets saying, "“All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though." He has also written that Islam is an "unmitigated evil," which is not only heinous, it is a tad inappropriate for a Biologist who claims to eschew religious thinking. Of course, Sam Harris, another leader of the "New Atheists" has also been effusive in his Islamophobia. Dawkins, however, is much smarter than Harris and should know better. As an atheist, myself, I have found their views troubling.

[ladderandbucket]

Joseph Mitchell had a great style. He wrote essays about early 20thC New York.

And yes, Dawkins has become a bit of an embarrassment in his later years. I was a fan of his early books. I still think he has an exceptional gift for writing pop-science, which of course requires some oversimplification. I do agree that Gould's essays strike a necessary note of scepticism - but Gould was also guilty of exaggerating the importance of his own ideas. I recently read this (rather entertaining) character assassination by one of his colleagues: http://www.unz.com/article/vignettes-of-famous-evolutionary-biologists-large-and-small/

[Pike Bishop]

I'm sorry, but that article about Gould was just a snarky vignette by an author who was ticked Gould didn't agree with his thesis. There was nothing scientific about it. And his dismissal of punctuated equlibrium is just wrong. Most evolutionary biologists at the time of Gould's conception of it held decidedly different views.

[lichtrausch]

Dawkins does take it a little far sometimes, but overall I appreciate the contributions he has made to the public discussions on science and religion. He helped open my eyes to the incredible power and beauty of science and the folly of religious belief.

[Iain Sparrow]

In his "Dear Muslima" "essay"--which I cannot re-print here because of content--Dawkins told Western feminists they shouldn't complain about sexual harassment, patriarchy, or our present rape culture because they don't have it as bad as Muslim women. Of course, many women, including female atheists, were justifiably incensed. Dawkins himself realized it was horrid and apologized.

As to his Islamophobia, he has railed off random tweets saying, "“All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though." He has also written that Islam is an "unmitigated evil," which is not only heinous, it is a tad inappropriate for a Biologist who claims to eschew religious thinking. Of course, Sam Harris, another leader of the "New Atheists" has also been effusive in his Islamophobia. Dawkins, however, is much smarter than Harris and should know better. As an atheist, myself, I have found their views troubling.

I did not realized he had written such things.
Besides being unacceptable coming from a person of his standing and intellect, the comments aren't even clever or particularly provocative. Just stupid.

[Pike Bishop]

That's why I informed you Iain. You seem like a thoughtful guy, and I didn't you think you would appreciate them. It is a drag when our heroes, or those we admire, disappoint us.