| The dean of American essayists, E. B. White, described the practitioner of his particular art in extravagant terms: "The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each new excursion of the essayists, each new 'attempt,' differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays." |
| White, of course, was teasing. But only just. The essay, as a genre, demands a peculiar "effrontery" and "stamina." Unlike the poem or story, the essay proclaims itself as its author's own thoughts. It seems to demandor enforcea kind of honesty, since the essayist must struggle to define himself or herself as well as the subject at hand. Thus, the essay seems naturally to attract autobiographers, writers willing to weather the pressures that attend the creation of selfhood. |
| White's allusion to the essay as an "attempt" refers to the linguistic origins of the form (the term derives from the French essai, meaning a "try"), which underscores the necessary tentativeness of the genre. An essay is not an article; it is not a thorough, scholarly treatment of an isolated subject. By definition it is an exploration, a journey out that frequently becomes, in the best examples, an inward journey, too, a picking at the thread which finally unravels the garment of the writer's particular concern and scrutiny. |
| The form itself has a distinguished history, beginning with Montaigne, who wrote in the latter half of the sixteenth century. The English, of course, have provided endless essayists of note, such as Dr. Johnson, Addison and Steele, Hazlitt, Macauley, Huxley and |
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