What an Essay Is

An essay is a typically short piece of writing, from an author's personal point of view. Essays are non-fiction but often subjective; while expository, they can also include narrative. Essays can be literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author.

The definition of an essay is vague, overlapping with those of an article and a short story. Almost all modern essays are written in prose, but works in verse have been dubbed essays (e.g. Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism and An Essay on Man). While brevity usually defines an essay, voluminous works like John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population provide counterexamples.

The word essay derives from the French infinitive essayer, 'to try' or 'to attempt'. In English essay first meant 'a trial' or 'an attempt', and this is still an alternative meaning. The first author to describe his works as essays was the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592); he used the term to characterize these as 'attempts' to put his thoughts adequately into writing. Inspired in particular by the works of Plutarch, a translation of whose Oeuvres morales (Moral works) into French had just been published by Jacques Amyot, Montaigne began to compose his essays in 1572; the first edition, entitled Essais, was published in two volumes in 1580. For the rest of his life he continued revising previously published essays and composing new ones.

Francis Bacon's essays, published in book form in 1597, 1612, and 1625, were the first works in English that described themselves as essays. Ben Jonson first used the word essayist in English in 1609, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Notable essayists are legion. They include G.K. Chesterton, Virginia Woolf, Voltaire, Adrienne Rich, Alamgir Hashmi, Joan Didion, Jean Baudrillard, Benjamin Disraeli, Susan Sontag, Natalia Ginzburg, Sara Suleri, Annie Dillard, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Charles Lamb, Leo Tolstoy, William Hazlitt, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Walter Bagehot, Maurice Maeterlinck, George Orwell, George Bernard Shaw, John D'Agata, Reynolds Price, Gore Vidal, Marguerite Yourcenar, J.M. Coetzee, Gaston Waringhien and E.B. White.

It is very difficult to define the genre into

...