Use the ‘additional suggestions’ box to tell us if your favourite essay or author is missing, or comment boxes on each essay’s page to discuss the selection, including where you feel we should have selected another essay by the same author. We will expand the Essay Library in future, using suggestions and comments received. Example intro length, with link to more if needed.
1925
Starting with the essayistic narcissism of meditating on his own writing hand, Lawrence then segues into why he writes novels: the novelist’s wisdom being the only one, he beli...
Read Essay1981
Calvino lists several definitions of ‘the classics’, starting with the witty observation that they are those books adults usually claim they are ‘rereading’. His o...
Read Essay1956
Despite her affinity with feline independence, intelligence and elegance, West owned a cat only late in life and this arch but tender piece is the result. Full of gentle, ...
Read Essay2005
Dyer tells the story of the Great Depression by looking at photographs of men’s hats. An author of far more stand-alone essays than most, this is in fact an excerpt – a brillia...
Read Essay1943
A diatribe carved out of such dry irony that the reader feels its case almost viscerally. After discussing the stigmatisation of the term ‘refugee’, Arendt then exam...
Read Essay1862
Aiming ‘to speak a word for Nature’, this essay saunters and surveys, with playful lateral logic. Thoreau’s wide-ranging allusions raise the piece above the spontaneous musin...
Read Essay1658
Prompted by 40-50 Roman burial urns unearthed in Norfolk, this five-part essay is mainly a survey of historical burial customs, ending with a moving, baroque meditation on mortalit...
Read Essay1919
Three years before The Waste Land, Eliot defends and gives critical language to his methods. Written in the tone of one skewering punier contemporary thinkers, Eliot redefines tra...
Read Essay1973
More specifically ‘French toys’, this short essay remarks on the way French children are only supplied with playthings that are miniaturised items from the adult world, complet...
Read Essay1982
This darkly humorous, postmodern essay of fragments by a popular OuLiPo author (whose day-job was as an archivist) starts with a ‘Summary’ of its eclectic subsections that suff...
Read Essay1957
De Beauvoir said this piece, at the aesthetic end of Sartre’s spectrum, was to be a book-length study of the Renaissance painter Tintoretto, foreshortened because Sartre disliked...
Read Essay1884
The subject is literal: cloud phenomena Ruskin observed over the course of fifty years. This very peculiar essay begins by describing normal weather formations, then argues that th...
Read Essay1711
Based on an idea ‘stolen’ from conversation with Jonathan Swift and prefiguring Swift’s later satire – a kind of inverted Gulliver’s Travels. The previous April, four...
Read Essay1712
After an opening declaration on the pleasures of detached, essayistic observation, or ‘spectating’, Steele describes coming from Richmond for a 24-hour ramble through central L...
Read Essay1712
Demonstrating the English periodical essay’s origins in clubbable conversation, and recurring concern with ‘good taste’, Addison describes friends discussing their food avers...
Read Essay1978
Kapuscinski presents himself as a hapless ‘amateur’ reporting to Warsaw on Latin American politics, for whom the 1969 war between Honduras and El Salvador, following an escalat...
Read Essay2000
An essay about how the ‘broken umbrella of contemporary relativism’ does not change the essentially different aims of history (that which is owed to reality) and imagination (p...
Read Essay1751
Embarking from Aristotle’s observation that man is ‘an imitative being’, Johnson attacks the fashion for retiring to the country for the summer as either mindless imitation o...
Read Essay1751
Referring to the bravery of bringing forward new ideas, Johnson makes the mock-heroic announcement that he is introducing new theories on ‘the garret’, mighty subject though it...
Read Essay1861
Written at 57, two years before his death, this is the novelist’s fantasy wish-list in the format of an international treaty. Article 1 demands a good death, but, by Art...
Read Essay1863
A string of eleven mini-essays praising the artist Constantin Guys for seeking ‘the fugitive, fleeting beauty of present-day life’ in almost journalistic watercolour sketches, ...
Read Essay1942
A long essay with four chapters (and an appendix on Kafka), asking whether the realisation that life is meaningless requires suicide. Camus defines absurdity as man’s rationality...
Read Essay1903
This precursor of urban sociology analyses metropolitan life’s impact on the personality. Throughout history, Simmel sees people resisting ‘being leveled down and worn out by a...
Read Essay1983
A neurological case-study of ‘visual agnosia’, written in the accessible, urbane style that made the book a bestseller. The reader journeys through Dr Sacks’ bizarre examinat...
Read Essay1960
Written in the inclusive pronoun (‘We’), yet sometimes asserting singularity (‘Now I believe…’), Ginzburg lectures movingly on the error of teaching children little, risk...
Read Essay1953
Berlin takes the Ancient Greek fragment stating that ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’ as an entertaining basis for dividing thinkers into hedge...
Read Essay1849
A long essay that gallops around de Quincey’s nostalgia for riding on the mail-coaches when an Oxford student, with a tour-de-force at its core where he narrates a near-collisi...
Read Essay1955
It is unjust that this astute analysis is best known for the ‘tease’ of ‘U’ and ‘non-U’ linguistic demarcations between the upper middle class and those below. The essa...
Read Essay1852
The ‘18th Brumaire’ was the day in 1799 when Napoleon Bonaparte made himself dictator, and here Marx compares this coup with that of Bonaparte’s nephew on 2 December 1851, a...
Read Essay1960
Butler locates this essay in his own backyard – Tipperary’s hill of Slievenaman – and talks as if we are his neighbours, who already know local Irish legends well. H...
Read Essay1957
Capote’s profile of Marlon Brando is framed by an evening in a Kyoto hotel when Brando was filming on location. Aside from Peter-Selleresque racisms, the tone is beautifully judg...
Read Essay1891
A mock-Socratic dialogue, in which ‘Vivian’ reads ‘Cyril’ highlights from a longer article. Vivian argues that Art expresses only itself and serves no other end, while Life...
Read Essay1926
A piece both prophetic and self-consciously of its time. Woolf begins disparagingly: the art of making movies is still too young and banal; we are savages knocking together saxopho...
Read Essay1993
An acclaimed Polish poet portrays the ‘tulipomania’ that seized the Netherlands in the seventeenth century as exemplary of all ‘follies in the sanctuaries of reason’. ...
Read Essay1985
Not so much a book review as a book abridgement, the historian Richard Cobb adds his own passionate style and personal observations to the, presumably drier, Yale research of one P...
Read Essay1941
Orwell was one of the first critics to take popular culture seriously – in this case, British seaside postcards showing vulgar, illustrated jokes (produced by McGill). H...
Read Essay2002
An example of how the personal essay form can be used to say something both more simple and profound than any amount of in-depth commentary by political journalists. Start...
Read Essay1772
(‘Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, ou dialogue entre A et B sur l'inconvénient d'attacher des idées morales à certaines actions physiques qui n'en comportent pas’) ...
Read Essay1989
An elegant, short essay by Levi the scientist, rather than Levi the Auschwitz survivor, which nonetheless turns to subtle metaphor at the end and so speaks to the stable/unstable n...
Read Essay1982
Wrenched from Rich’s multiple identities (a Jewish lesbian ‘raised to be a heterosexual gentile’), this is prose elaboration upon one line of her early poetry. It de...
Read Essay1956
A Romanian intellectual discourages an aspiring author. Intending to shock, Cioran spews vitriol over the twentieth century addiction to confessional, therapeutic self-expression, ...
Read Essay1997
America’s most popular living essayist, Sedaris begins this hilarious piece on cultural idiosyncrasies with the small-talk he makes in new places. One of his regular ope...
Read Essay1949
Inspired by Gandhi’s autobiography, this is one great ethical thinker reflecting on another. Orwell measures Gandhi in accessible terms based on biographical detail, then moves o...
Read Essay1993
In this compact essay, which remains an unanswered enquiry more than most ‘essais’, an esteemed analyst of children wonders that the childhood experience of being tickled by a ...
Read Essay1851
A sardonic essay in twelve short aphoristic sections, in which Schopenhauer emphasizes the differences between scholars and thinkers. Ultimately it is only our own ideas t...
Read Essay1874
Germany’s first modern essayist attacks his culture’s ‘oversaturation’ in historicism and Hegel in a ‘treatise’ of engaging playfulness – for example, the comparison ...
Read Essay127
Plutarch uses Homer’s Odysseus to dramatize a first-century debate about consciousness and character. Odysseus is trying to get his compatriots turned back from pigs into men by ...
Read Essay1869
Possibly co-authored by his wife Harriet Taylor Mill, this is a boat-rocking attack on the socio-legal inequalities imposed on Victorian women. The argument aims not solely to bene...
Read Essay1826
Hazlitt’s antipathy for a spider prompts reflection on how we can suppress violent actions but not instincts. This quickly escalates to an attack on the religious pretexts for wa...
Read Essay1595
An essay that combines Montaigne’s review of what it was like to have sex with a lame woman with the profound theme of mankind’s tendency to self-deception. It begins,...
Read Essay1595
Montaigne’s relativism recognizes that ‘every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to’; if the Tupinambá tribesmen of Brazil are ‘savages’, so are European ...
Read Essay1797
A year before Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’, Wollstonecraft defines the Romantic Poet. Beginning like a periodical piece, laughing at how city people go to the country but don...
Read Essay-45
The 84-year-old author, using Marcus Cato as narrator, and playing wittily with the allowances made for elderly garrulity and digression, advises us to trust Nature’s wisdom, ada...
Read Essay1810
Dramatised as a dialogue between friends on a park bench in 1801, this essay is about far more than puppets, though they are discussed with more seriousness than a mere starting-po...
Read Essay1977
A clinical paper that reads as an elegant essay despite its professional vocabulary, relevant to every writer or artist who claims that staring out the window is working. ...
Read Essay1966
Full of puzzlement at cryptic jottings in her old notebooks, and the film-clip memories they eventually trigger, Didion’s essay is a meditation on modern consciousness, how to ha...
Read Essay56
Seneca’s profound understanding of the psychology of State terror makes this more than standard advice literature, going beyond ‘clemency’ strictly defined into a...
Read Essay1922
The ‘Sage of Baltimore’ begins with hyperbolic condemnation of the American government, courts, foreign policy and people. Yet unlike ‘fugitive Young Intellectuals’, he ask...
Read Essay1625
A radical comparison (for its time) between the relative evils of atheism and zealous, materialistic, bigoted, petty religion (‘superstition’). Bacon finds in favourÂ...
Read Essay1822
This commences with bald Romanticism – declaring the pleasure of a solitary tromp through nature – but then qualifies itself. Unlike Coleridge, the prickly Hazlitt cannot walk ...
Read Essay1625
Beginning with friendship’s antithesis, the hermit, Bacon warns that a life amid a crowd of acquaintance can be just as empty of true friendship. He exults in the comfor...
Read Essay1964
Sontag modestly called this, her most influential essay, ‘jottings’ because it comprises numbered points, but it is certainly an essay in the experimental sense: testing what i...
Read Essay1954
McCarthy mocks the ‘true confessions of reformed Communists’, before describing her own mock-heroic journey from Vassar college girl to fervent Trotskyite. Though some...
Read Essay1823
(Not to be confused with Hunt’s essay-pair also titled 'My Books' in The New Monthly Magazine, September and October 1825) Hunt reminisces in Italy about his cozy English stu...
Read Essay1917
In this milestone in psychoanalytical thought Freud contrasts ‘normal’ mourning (not only for a loved-one’s death, though note the essay’s date, but also for lost ideals) t...
Read Essay1961
This profile of jazz trumpeter Miles Davis begins with musical history and critique, then describes ‘Miles in the flesh’: his extreme egotism and disdain for the British, yet t...
Read Essay1976
A Russian memoir in English that refuses the usual life-story linearity or hierarchies: ‘To get a low grade, to operate a milling machine, to be beaten up at an interrogation, or...
Read Essay1869
A biographical and critical essay of a style that would be considered unacceptably impressionistic and rhapsodic today, but which retains the ‘air of truth’ despite all the int...
Read Essay1920
After a charmingly self-deprecating start, Beerbohm’s very British difficulties coping with theory and philosophy lead him to achieve what Bergson could not: an essay on laughter...
Read Essay1995
Despite an early definition (‘If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, Junk-Space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet.’), this essay is as disorient...
Read Essay1911
Yeats’ tribute to his dead friend opens dramatically with the riots that greeted Synge’s Playboy of the Western World. Yeats argues against picturesque, trivial or declamatory...
Read Essay1943
Distinguishing between the soul’s cry ‘Why am I being hurt?’ and the superficial cry ‘Why has somebody else got more than I have?’, Weil argues that the best society is a...
Read Essay2005
Originating in a fiercely satirical protest sent by a Kenyan-born author to the editors of Granta, this essay has turned Wainaina into the unofficial ‘censor’ of white writing...
Read Essay1981
A critic writes with tenderness about his Appalachian childhood Sundays spent foraging with his father for Native American arrowheads. He then made no connection between t...
Read Essay1971
An essay resisting paraphrase as it attempts to define an experience ‘seldom referred to only because it is nameless’. It begins with poetic description of how a momen...
Read Essay1844
Emerson finds himself standing halfway up some stairs; an image of personal disorientation in middle age and an allegory for Life. He writes with wit and candour about procrastinat...
Read Essay1810
The essay in which Wordsworth uttered the Romantic Biographer’s credo: that commemoration is ‘truth hallowed by love’, truth ‘of the highest order’, even if it glosses ov...
Read Essay1993
The most intellectual yet unpretentious essay on the cultural impact of television – a crater so huge we forget we stand in it. Foster Wallace begins with a Walter Benjaminesque ...
Read Essay1975
An Oxford don considers what his colleagues might look like, collectively, to a ‘non-don’, in terms of arrogance, bumptiousness, insolence, economic parasitism, hypocritical li...
Read Essay1963
Baldwin wrote this long essay amidst the Civil Rights Movement, but it speaks forcefully to post-9/11 preoccupations. Structured around two autobiographical passages – h...
Read Essay1754
Answering the Academy of Dijon’s question ‘What is the origin of inequality among men, and whether it is authorized by the natural Law’, this essay acknowledges natural physi...
Read Essay1905
Note: Another Proust essay of the same title, designated ‘Days of Reading II’ by Penguin Classics, was published in Le Figaro in 1907; the latter mostly concerns the marve...
Read Essay1978
Gould was an influential evolutionary biologist interested in Darwin’s purposeless, materialistic worldview as an answer to man’s ongoing cosmic arrogance. This essay, however,...
Read Essay1933
Composed under Stalinist persecution, this is a statement of Mandelstam’s own poetics and of Dante viewed through a Russian lens: ‘If the halls of the Hermitage should suddenly...
Read Essay1834
An exiled poet who knew the leading thinkers of his generation discusses the subject as labeled on the tin, though with more idiosyncrasy and a great deal more irony than that labe...
Read Essay1776
‘It would be difficult to name any human composition which has had an effect at once so instant, so extended and so lasting…’ (G.M.Trevelyan). This anonymous pamphlet’s rad...
Read Essay1841
Water’s concentric circles are ‘the highest emblem’ in the world’s ‘cipher’ since all life is, read rightly, cyclical. An affirmative essay, it contains one huge doubt:...
Read Essay1990
The title catchily paraphrases: ‘Can the cosmic and historical drama be interpreted as a movement towards the ultimate reconciliation of all things?’ This is not simpl...
Read Essay1948
Biathanatos is a treatise by the poet John Donne with the subtitle ‘That Self-homicide is not so Naturally Sin that it may never be otherwise’. Borges, following De Quince...
Read Essay1971
Paz essays usually make historical approaches, but here he approaches the United States as subject through a Utopia, that of Fourier, involving perspectives of ‘Erotics and Gastr...
Read Essay1784
A prototype for bloggers philosophizing in their pyjamas, Kant’s influential essay responded to a question posed to ‘the public’ in a Berlin journal. Its first sent...
Read Essay1949
Connolly uses a fictional-hypothetical character, a young American novelist he calls Bisbee, to view post-war London and its ‘shabby’ yet seductive literary world through cold,...
Read Essay1212
The pre-eminent example of Japanese ‘recluse literature’ and part of the ‘zuihitsu’ genre (personal essays and prose fragments, usually responding to the writer’s surro...
Read Essay1878
A well-wrought ‘illumination’ on how our material environment determines culture, habits and happiness. Stevenson re-imagines the city before public lighting, each man...
Read Essay1908
Chesterton decides to sketch on the Sussex downs, prompting a lightly comic encounter with a housekeeper about obtaining brown paper and a digression on pocket contents. H...
Read Essay1729
This is an anti-colonialist satire, in the style of Juvenal or Tertullian, sarcastically suggesting that the solution to Irish poverty is for the Catholics to sell their children a...
Read Essay1902
While clearly fictional – this ‘letter’ purports to be sent in 1603 from the English Lord Chandos to Francis Bacon – this nonetheless merits categorization as an essay beca...
Read Essay1821
Written in answer to his friend Thomas Love Peacock’s essay ‘The Four Ages of Poetry’ (1820), this begins as a treatise of ‘accurate philosophy’ but, aptly, evolves into ...
Read Essay1821
After the most extreme example of Lamb’s periphrastic, ironic, Sternean style – ‘those exterior twin appendages, hanging ornaments and (architecturally speaking) handsome vol...
Read Essay1932
To test the power and processes of memory, Benjamin recollects splinters of his childhood and time as a young, pre-First World War revolutionary. But space, the depopulate...
Read Essay