The essay — from Montaigne's essais, meaning "attempts" or "trials" — has been one of American literature's most consistently vital forms, and arguably the form in which American writers have done their most original thinking. The line runs from Emerson and Thoreau through Baldwin, Didion, Ellison, and Sontag to Coates and continues to be the form in which American writers work out the relationship between the self, society, and the claims of conscience. What distinguishes the American essay tradition is its persistent fusion of the personal and the political — the insistence that thinking about justice, race, nature, or culture is not separable from the thinker's situation and experience.
The essay does not have the institutional prestige of the novel or the cultural visibility of film, but its influence on American intellectual life is disproportionate. Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time," Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," Ellison's "The World and the Jug," Coates's "The Case for Reparations" — these are texts that changed the terms of public argument.
Annotated bibliography
The founding voices
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844) — "Self-Reliance," "Experience," "The Poet," "Circles." Emerson invented the American essay as a form of philosophical improvisation. The sentences are aphoristic, the argument is associative rather than linear, and the subject is always the individual mind's encounter with the world.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854) — part memoir, part essay, part social criticism, part natural history. "Civil Disobedience" (1849) is the essay with the largest political consequences, but Walden is the more sustained literary achievement.
Frederick Douglass, speeches and editorials (collected in various editions) — Douglass was not an essayist in the Emersonian sense, but his speeches and editorials ("What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?," 1852) are among the most powerful works of American rhetoric and belong in any account of the essay tradition.
The mid-century masters
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), The Fire Next Time (1963) — Baldwin is the tradition's central figure after Emerson. The essays fuse autobiography, cultural criticism, and moral argument in a way no other American writer has matched. "The Fire Next Time" is the single most important American essay of the twentieth century.
Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986) — Ellison's essays on literature, music, and American identity are as important as Invisible Man. "The World and the Jug" (the exchange with Irving Howe) is the definitive statement of the Black writer's refusal to be reduced to sociology.
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (1966), Styles of Radical Will (1969), Under the Sign of Saturn (1980), Where the Stress Falls (2001) — Sontag brought European intellectual culture (Benjamin, Barthes, Artaud, Godard) into American criticism and insisted that the essay could be a vehicle for serious thinking about aesthetics, politics, and morality simultaneously.
Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), The White Album (1979) — Didion's essays on California, the counterculture, and the disorder beneath American surfaces. "The White Album" is the essay as nervous breakdown; "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" is the essay as social reportage. Her later work — The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), Blue Nights (2011) — extended the form into grief and memory.
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) — three lectures, but essayistic in form and argument. Morrison's analysis of how the "Africanist presence" shaped the American literary canon is the most important work of American literary criticism since Ellison's essays.
The agrarian and ecological line
Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (1977), What Are People For? (1990), Life Is a Miracle (2000) — Berry is Thoreau's heir: the essayist as farmer, the argument for local knowledge, agrarian life, and ecological responsibility as forms of political resistance. His prose is plain, patient, and more radical than it first appears.
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949) — the founding text of the ecological essay; Leopold's "land ethic" argued that the moral community must be extended to include the natural world.
The contemporary generation
Ta-Nehisi Coates, "The Case for Reparations" (The Atlantic, 2014) and Between the World and Me (2015) — Coates is Baldwin's most visible successor. "The Case for Reparations" reopened a political argument through historical reporting and moral insistence. Between the World and Me — a letter to his son — carries the essay-as-address from Baldwin's "My Dungeon Shook" into the twenty-first century.
Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam (1998), When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012), The Givenness of Things (2015) — Robinson's essays defend the intellectual seriousness of American Calvinism and argue for generosity, inwardness, and democratic idealism in a culture that she finds increasingly hostile to all three.
Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind (2009), Feel Free (2018) — Smith (British-born, now New York-based) writes literary and cultural essays in the Sontag-Baldwin line; wide-ranging, intellectually serious, stylistically self-aware.
The essay as a form: critical and theoretical
Phillip Lopate, ed., The Art of the Personal Essay (1994) — the essential anthology, with a long, excellent introduction that traces the form from Seneca and Montaigne through the present.
George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language" (1946), "Why I Write" (1946) — Orwell is British, not American, but his influence on American essay practice — the plain style, the insistence on clarity as a political virtue — is pervasive.
Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (1925, 1932) — also British, and also formative for the American essay tradition, especially for Didion and Sontag.