Essayists

Hello all! I am very fond of the essay form, from literary criticism to familiar essays, from Montaigne to Epstein, from the United States to France and beyond. I am always looking for new essayists, since many seem to be disregarded and forgotten. Additionally, many literary figures of prominence wrote essays which are rarely read.

My favorite essayists are Thomas De Quincey, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, John Ruskin, George Bernard Shaw, Robert Louis Stevenson, Van Wyck Brooks, Thomas Mann, George Orwell, H.L. Mencken, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Francis Bacon, Addison & Steele, W.C. Brownell, Maurice Maeterlinck, James Huneker, Charles Lamb, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Carlyle, Jorge Luis Borges and William Hazlitt.

I've also enjoyed various pieces by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bayard Taylor, Theodor Adorno, Abraham Cowley, Joseph Epstein, George Eliot, Oliver Goldsmith, G.K. Chesterton, Havelock Ellis, Christopher Hitchens, Craig Raine, Jonathan Rosenbaum and Leigh Hunt.

Currently on my to-read list are Henry James (New York Prefaces and Literary Criticism; Library of America), Edgar Allen Poe (Reviews and Essays; Library of America), Charles Sainte-Beuve, Friedrich Schiller, William James, Albert Camus (Lyrical and Critical Essays), Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Lord Jeffrey, Jonathan Swift, James Baldwin, Charles Baudelaire, Victor Brombert, James Wolcott, F.R. Leavis, Vissarion Belinsky, John Morley of Blackburn, Ferdinand Brunetière, James Agee, Henry David Thoreau, Samuel Johnson, David Hume, Walter Bagehot, Walter Pater, John Updike, Graham Greene, T.S. Eliot, Edmund Burke, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, E.B. White, W.H. Auden, George Jean Nathan, Bertrand Russell, Hjalmar Hjorth, Richard Holt Hutton, Georg Brandes, John Stuart Blackie, Arthur Bingham Walkley, Anatole France, Maurice Barrès, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Jules Lemaître, Émile Faguet, Remy de Gourmont and George Meredith.

If you have any recommendations, among those listed or otherwise, I would be very glad to hear them!

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Originally Posted by Iphigenia

Hello all! I am very fond of the essay form, from literary criticism to familiar essays, from Montaigne to Epstein, from the United States to France and beyond. I am always looking for new essayists, since many seem to be disregarded and forgotten. Additionally, many literary figures of prominence wrote essays which are rarely read.

My favorite essayists are Thomas De Quincey, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, John Ruskin, George Bernard Shaw, Robert Louis Stevenson, Van Wyck Brooks, Thomas Mann, George Orwell, H.L. Mencken, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Francis Bacon, Addison & Steele, W.C. Brownell, Maurice Maeterlinck, James Huneker, Charles Lamb, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Carlyle, Jorge Luis Borges and William Hazlitt.

I've also enjoyed various pieces by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bayard Taylor, Theodor Adorno, Abraham Cowley, Joseph Epstein, George Eliot, Oliver Goldsmith, G.K. Chesterton, Havelock Ellis, Christopher Hitchens, Craig Raine, Jonathan Rosenbaum and Leigh Hunt.

Currently on my to-read list are Henry James (New York Prefaces and Literary Criticism; Library of America), Edgar Allen Poe (Reviews and Essays; Library of America), Charles Sainte-Beuve, Friedrich Schiller, William James, Albert Camus (Lyrical and Critical Essays), Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Lord Jeffrey, Jonathan Swift, James Baldwin, Charles Baudelaire, Victor Brombert, James Wolcott, F.R. Leavis, Vissarion Belinsky, John Morley of Blackburn, Ferdinand Brunetière, James Agee, Henry David Thoreau, Samuel Johnson, David Hume, Walter Bagehot, Walter Pater, John Updike, Graham Greene, T.S. Eliot, Edmund Burke, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, E.B. White, W.H. Auden, George Jean Nathan, Bertrand Russell, Hjalmar Hjorth, Richard Holt Hutton, Georg Brandes, John Stuart Blackie, Arthur Bingham Walkley, Anatole France, Maurice Barrès, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Jules Lemaître, Émile Faguet, Remy de Gourmont and George Meredith.

If you have any recommendations, among those listed or otherwise, I would be very glad to hear them!

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Some of my favourite essays are:

"The Fire Next Time" - James Baldwin
"Self Reliance" - R.W. Emerson
"The Myth of Sisyphus" - Albert Camus
"What I Have Lived For" - Bertrand Russell

Some specific recommendations I have are:

"Eulogy on the Dog" - George Graham Vest

This is the essay that coined the phrase "Dog is Man's Best Friend" is particularly touching for any dog lover

"The Art of Fiction" by Henry James & "True Art Speaks Plainly" by Theodore Dreiser

I was introduced to these essays in my American Literature class and they offer opposite views of the "point" of Art.

"E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction"

I'm surprised you don't have David Foster Wallace on your lists, as I consider him arguably the best "contemporary" essayist. Many of them are worth reading, but this one is my favourite.

Lastly, I'll mention my favourite author Vladimir Nabokov. I'm not sure if you'll like his "essays" because they don't really deal with large ideas, but are absolutely beautiful in structure and style. The book Strong Opinions contains several and even some of his replies to questions from an interviewer are quite long and are like mini-essays that offer an intimate look into his philosophy of art.

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Originally Posted by R.F. Schiller

Some of my favourite essays are:

"The Fire Next Time" - James Baldwin
"Self Reliance" - R.W. Emerson
"The Myth of Sisyphus" - Albert Camus
"What I Have Lived For" - Bertrand Russell

Some specific recommendations I have are:

"Eulogy on the Dog" - George Graham Vest

This is the essay that coined the phrase "Dog is Man's Best Friend" is particularly touching for any dog lover

"The Art of Fiction" by Henry James & "True Art Speaks Plainly" by Theodore Dreiser

I was introduced to these essays in my American Literature class and they offer opposite views of the "point" of Art.

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Ah, thank you for these! The famous Emerson one is as powerful as always. My personal favorite Emerson essay/lecture is Literary Ethics. I will be certain to read the Camus, Baldwin, James and Russell essays soon. I am very curious about the Dreiser one. His essay collection Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub wasn't particularly successful, though it does have the customary charms of Dreiser.

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Originally Posted by R.F. Schiller

"E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction"

I'm surprised you don't have David Foster Wallace on your lists, as I consider him arguably the best "contemporary" essayist. Many of them are worth reading, but this one is my favourite.

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You're right: I simply forgot him. I've read Consider the Lobster (the title essay only, that is) and enjoyed it: I planned to peruse his other works. (Infinite Jest too, which I still haven't read.)

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Originally Posted by R.F. Schiller

Lastly, I'll mention my favourite author Vladimir Nabokov. I'm not sure if you'll like his "essays" because they don't really deal with large ideas, but are absolutely beautiful in structure and style. The book Strong Opinions contains several and even some of his replies to questions from an interviewer are quite long and are like mini-essays that offer an intimate look into his philosophy of art.

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I trust Nabokov will be pleasing in nearly every from. Isn't Speak, Memory essentially a collection of autobiographical essays? In that case I'd have to add him to my favorites! I'll certainly check out Strong Opinions. Do you have experience with the Lectures on Literature and Lectures on American Literature?

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Originally Posted by Iphigenia

Ah, thank you for these! The famous Emerson one is as powerful as always. My personal favorite Emerson essay/lecture is Literary Ethics. I will be certain to read the Camus, Baldwin, James and Russell essays soon. I am very curious about the Dreiser one. His essay collection Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub wasn't particularly successful, though it does have the customary charms of Dreiser.

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Honestly, Dreiser is a pretty mediocre writer IMO in fiction and non-fiction, but the particular one I mentioned is important in its ideas. It also forms a nice dichotomy with the James essay, which I think is substantially better (but much longer too!).

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Originally Posted by Iphigenia

I trust Nabokov will be pleasing in nearly every from. Isn't Speak, Memory essentially a collection of autobiographical essays? In that case I'd have to add him to my favorites! I'll certainly check out Strong Opinions. Do you have experience with the Lectures on Literature and Lectures on American Literature?

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To the bolded, kind of. Each chapter essentially stands on its own. Some read more like short stories, like the chapter "Mademoiselle O" (it was actually conceived as non-fictional short story originally written in French) and the last chapter where he talks about his first true love, Valentin Shulgin (called "Tamara" in the chapter). Others, like the chapter solely dedicated to butterflies, do read more like an essay as you have suggested. As to his lectures you've mentioned, (there is also a separately published Lectures on Don Quixote and Lectures on Russian Literature, I believe), I haven't come close to finishing reading them, but I have read the ones on Kafka's The Metamorphosis, Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, all of which are excellent. By the way, there is no Lectures on American Literature. Nabokov taught Russian Literature and a course called Masterpieces of European Fiction (Austen, Dickens, Flaubert, Kafka, Tolstoy, Joyce). Nabokov actually despised much of the American writers like Faulkner, Hemingway, Dreiser and James and he only really liked Poe until he got older. I also have heard some things of the other lectures that I haven't read. Nabokov had a different way of teaching and analyzing literature to a lot of the professors I've encountered in University. I'll summarize them below:

***SPOILER****

He believed in very detailed visualization; he would draw out a map of Dublin for Ulysses, he would draw out an exact picture of the residence & laboratory of Dr. Jekyll in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and most interestingly, he argued that Gregor Samsa was not a cockroach as many scholars have suggested, but a distinct type of beetle (he was an expert on butterflies and moths so I guess he knew a little bit about beetles as well) which he made his students at Cornell copy out by hand with labels. He also did not care too much about general themes of novels. He felt that other professors were too concerned with the novel as an idea (i.e. The theme of poverty in ____, the theme of alienation in ____), rather than art. He also disliked overly interpreting symbols (i.e. X in ____ represents Y, which speaks to the theme of Z). He believed that good art would heighten the consciousness of the reader, to feel a sense of aesthetic bliss and a tingle in the spine. Lastly, what I found interesting was that Nabokov believed one could only derive anything from art by re-reading it. And I don't mean read a novel, put it down, read other stuff and then read it again 6 months later. Nabokov believed in finishing a novel, then starting it again immediately, often to the annoyance of his students. There is one anecdote from Cornell where Nabokov gave his students a week to read Anna Karenina, a ~1,000 page mammoth, and then gave them another week to immediately re-read it. Same with Ulysses.

***SPOILER END****

Nabokov also wrote a study of Nikolai Gogol that I have read (titled Nikolai Gogol) and is as one critic put it "brilliant, but eccentric". In a supposedly scholarly and critical work, Nabokov occasionally adds personal details of himself and calls someone a philistine once in a while and spends pages ripping certain translations of Gogol to shreds.

I strongly, strongly recommend William H. Gass's essays. Extremely erudite, well-read and has a savage wit. Beautiful prose as well.

The 8 Tang-Song masters of ancient china exist in a few translations. That is some powerful rhetorical prose.

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Originally Posted by R.F. Schiller

Honestly, Dreiser is a pretty mediocre writer IMO in fiction and non-fiction, but the particular one I mentioned is important in its ideas. It also forms a nice dichotomy with the James essay, which I think is substantially better (but much longer too!).

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Dreiser is a strange figure, to be sure. His prose is so charmingly messy and his ideas very confounded; but I can't help but like him: if not as a great writer, then as an odd one.

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Originally Posted by R.F. Schiller

To the bolded, kind of. Each chapter essentially stands on its own. Some read more like short stories, like the chapter "Mademoiselle O" (it was actually conceived as non-fictional short story originally written in French) and the last chapter where he talks about his first true love, Valentin Shulgin (called "Tamara" in the chapter). Others, like the chapter solely dedicated to butterflies, do read more like an essay as you have suggested. As to his lectures you've mentioned, (there is also a separately published Lectures on Don Quixote and Lectures on Russian Literature, I believe), I haven't come close to finishing reading them, but I have read the ones on Kafka's The Metamorphosis, Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, all of which are excellent. By the way, there is no Lectures on American Literature. Nabokov taught Russian Literature and a course called Masterpieces of European Fiction (Austen, Dickens, Flaubert, Kafka, Tolstoy, Joyce). Nabokov actually despised much of the American writers like Faulkner, Hemingway, Dreiser and James and he only really liked Poe until he got older. I also have heard some things of the other lectures that I haven't read. Nabokov had a different way of teaching and analyzing literature to a lot of the professors I've encountered in University. I'll summarize them below:

***SPOILER****
...

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You've certainly intrigued me. Edward Epstein's story about his movie-watching escapades as Nabokov student at Cornell always amused me. I require some different literary criticism to get me out of the vogue of Matthew Arnold and his followers anyway. As a matter of fact I am not too far removed from purchasing a volume of Borges' lectures on literature, who had his own teaching style too. He advised students to put a book down if it bored them -- "that book was not written for you" -- and characterized himself as a "hedonistic" reader.

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Originally Posted by Pierre Menard

I strongly, strongly recommend William H. Gass's essays. Extremely erudite, well-read and has a savage wit. Beautiful prose as well.

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Ah, thank you for the recommendation! He seems like the sort of writer I would thoroughly enjoy.

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Originally Posted by JBI

The 8 Tang-Song masters of ancient china exist in a few translations. That is some powerful rhetorical prose.

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That sounds very promising. Would you say it is better to take a general volume of writing from the era, or a specific one focusing on a single figure? Or do you have no experience with translations because you can read the originals? In any case, I'll be sure to read something by them. It's strange how little known they are here. The Wikipedia page of Han Yu cites a guidebook that says he is "comparable in stature to Dante, Shakespeare or Goethe" yet there appears to be no volume of his writings readily available in English!