"Que sais-je?" — what do I know? Montaigne to Didion to Smith. The form, its history, its modern descendants on the page and on the screen.
An essay is a piece of prose that thinks. Argument is welcome but not required; the form's distinguishing feature is the visible movement of a mind — turning a question over, qualifying, doubting, returning, surprising itself.
The English word comes from the French essai — attempt, trial, weighing. Montaigne adopted it as a title in 1580 to mark that his pieces were not treatises, not orations, not letters; they were attempts. The choice was philosophical. He did not know, in advance, what he thought.
The form has carried that DNA for four-and-a-half centuries: an essay is a thinking-in-public, written for a reader presumed intelligent and patient. The mode survived the transition from manuscript to print, from print to magazine, from magazine to web, from web to substack and beyond.
This deck traces the form, its great practitioners, the major sub-traditions (familiar essay, essay-as-criticism, lyric essay, journalism-as-essay), and where it lives now.
Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592). Bordeaux nobleman, briefly mayor of Bordeaux, retired to his château library at age 38 to read, think, and write. The result was the Essais, published in 1580 (Books I and II), expanded 1588 (Book III), and added to until Montaigne's death.
The book was unprecedented. Montaigne wrote about himself — his digestive habits, his moods, his cat, his readings, his fears about death. He quoted Greek and Latin freely. He contradicted himself across pages and within paragraphs. He invented, in the act of writing, a new kind of subject: the modern self, observing itself.
The motto — "what do I know?" — became the form's permanent question. Montaigne's skepticism wasn't doctrinaire; it was a humility about the difficulty of self-knowledge and the contingency of opinion.
The 1580 first edition is still in print (in many translations). M. A. Screech's English translation (Penguin) is the standard scholarly edition; Donald Frame's the most readable. Sarah Bakewell's How to Live (2010) is the best modern biography.
Francis Bacon's Essays (first edition 1597, expanded 1612 and 1625) were the English answer. Bacon was philosopher, lawyer, Lord Chancellor — and a writer of compressed, aphoristic prose. His essays are short, topical, and pragmatic where Montaigne's are long, digressive, and personal.
Bacon and Montaigne represent the two poles the essay has oscillated between for 400 years. Bacon: the brisk, formal, argumentative essay — the form most academic essays still aspire to. Montaigne: the meandering, personal, exploratory essay — the form of the New Yorker, the personal essay, the literary blog.
Most great essayists since draw from both, in varying ratios. The "familiar" tradition (Lamb, Hazlitt, Stevenson, Thurber, White) is more Montaigne than Bacon. The "argumentative" tradition (Swift, Mill, Macaulay, Sontag, Coates) is more Bacon. The boundary is permeable. A single great essay typically does both.
The 18th century made the essay journalism. Coffeehouse culture in London produced the periodical — short, regular, conversational publications that traded on observation, satire, and wit.
Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. The Tatler (1709-11) and The Spectator (1711-12, revived 1714). The Spectator's daily essays, signed "Mr. Spectator," fictionalised an observer of London life. Addison was the better essayist; Steele the better editor. Their joint enterprise was the model for journalism for a century afterward.
Samuel Johnson. The Rambler (1750-52, 208 essays in two years), The Idler (1758-60). Johnson's prose is heavier, more Latinate, more obviously moralizing than Addison's — but the periodical form is the same. Johnson elevated the essay to philosophical seriousness while keeping its journalistic tempo.
Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" (1729) is the great satirical essay of the period. Sustained ironic argument for eating Irish babies. The form is Bacon (sustained argumentative thread) but the rhetorical register is unique; subsequent satire (Pope, Voltaire, Twain) draws from the well Swift dug.
The periodical essay invented the conditions under which the modern New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper's, and London Review of Books exist. The contract (regular publication, recognisable persona, light-but-serious topical address) has not changed in 300 years.
The early 19th century produced the canonical "familiar essay" — informal, autobiographical, written in a voice meant to feel like spoken intimacy.
Charles Lamb. Essays of Elia (1823, 1833). Sensitive, playful, personal. "A Dissertation upon Roast Pig," "Dream-Children: A Reverie," "The Superannuated Man." The Elia persona allowed Lamb autobiographical confession in third-person remove. The model for Thurber, White, and the entire New Yorker tradition of the gentle personal essay.
William Hazlitt. Table-Talk (1821-22), The Plain Speaker (1826), the great essays "On the Pleasure of Hating," "On Going a Journey," "On the Fight." Hazlitt's prose is more muscular, more polemical than Lamb's. He was a working journalist; his essays earned his living.
Thomas De Quincey. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). Memoir-as-essay; intoxicated reverie as a literary mode. The opening of the lyric-essay tradition that runs through Baudelaire, Walter Pater, and the modern lyric essayists (Anne Carson, Maggie Nelson).
The Romantic essayists invented the persona-driven, prose-as-character voice that subsequent essayists inherit whether they know it or not. Reading Lamb is reading the family resemblance of three centuries of subsequent personal-voice writing.
The 19th century made the essay a vehicle for sustained argument about society and culture.
Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin. The great Victorian sage-essayists. Past and Present, Lord Clive, Culture and Anarchy, Unto This Last. Heavy, declarative, often hectoring; the essay as preaching for the secular age.
John Stuart Mill. On Liberty (1859), The Subjection of Women (1869). Sustained philosophical essay in the Bacon tradition. Mill's prose is unornamented and clear; the essays are still the foundational liberal-political documents.
Walter Pater. Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). Critical essays as lyric prose-poems. The closing "Conclusion" with its "to burn always with this hard, gemlike flame" was the manifesto of late-Victorian aestheticism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Essays: First Series (1841), Essays: Second Series (1844). "Self-Reliance," "Compensation," "The Over-Soul." American transcendentalism in essay form. Emerson invented an American essay voice — confident, oracular, unembarrassed about generalisation — that still echoes in essayists from Annie Dillard to Marilynne Robinson.
Henry David Thoreau. "Civil Disobedience" (1849), "Walking" (1862). Practical essay-pamphlets. Walden (1854) is essay-as-book — a year's reflection structured as expanded essay.
The early 20th century produced great essayists alongside great novelists.
Virginia Woolf. The Common Reader (1925, 1932), A Room of One's Own (1929), Three Guineas (1938). Among the great essayists in English, period. Woolf's prose moved easily from criticism to autobiography to social argument to lyric. The Common Reader essays — written for the literate non-specialist — are still the model for accessible literary criticism.
George Orwell. "Politics and the English Language" (1946), "Shooting an Elephant" (1936), "A Hanging" (1931), "Such, Such Were the Joys" (1952). The English plain style at its peak. Orwell's six rules for political writing in the language essay are still cited as a working manual.
T.S. Eliot. The Sacred Wood (1920), Selected Essays (1932). Critical essays that shifted the canon — "Tradition and the Individual Talent," "Hamlet and His Problems." Eliot's institutional influence (through editorship of the Criterion, then Faber) was disproportionate; his essay style was magisterial and impersonal.
Walter Benjamin. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936), "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940). German-language essayist whose influence on Anglo-American thought via translation has been decisive.
Theodor Adorno. "The Essay as Form" (1958) is the field's central self-reflection. The essay, Adorno argued, resists systematic philosophy precisely because it begins not with first principles but with concrete objects, and it ends without forcing closure.
The New Yorker (founded 1925, Harold Ross) developed a recognisable essay voice over the mid-20th century — long-form, observational, comedic-tending, fact-checked obsessively, edited heavily.
E.B. White. "Here Is New York" (1949). "Once More to the Lake" (1941). The New Yorker familiar-essay voice in its perfected form. White also rewrote Strunk's Elements of Style (1959, "Strunk and White") — the standard American-English style guide for half a century.
James Thurber. Short comic personal essays, often visually accompanied by his own line drawings.
Janet Malcolm. The most uncomfortable major essayist of the late 20th century. The Journalist and the Murderer (1990) opens "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible." Her body of work — on psychoanalysis, on Plath, on Chekhov, on the Sheila McGough trial — sustained moral inquiry in the long essay form.
Joan Didion. Essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), The White Album (1979). "Goodbye to All That," "On Self-Respect." The most-imitated essay voice of the late 20th century — the cool observational distance, the noun-heavy specific detail, the personal-as-historical.
John McPhee. Long-form essay-journalism. Coming into the Country, Annals of the Former World. The author's Draft No. 4 (2017) is a working essay manual.
Pauline Kael. Film criticism as personal essay. The reviewing voice as honest, opinionated, unpretentious.
Mid-century New York and London produced essayists working in the magazine form at the highest level of philosophical and political seriousness.
Susan Sontag. Against Interpretation (1966), On Photography (1977), Illness as Metaphor (1978). Sontag wrote essay-books — book-length essays — and shorter magazine pieces. The most-discussed American essayist of her generation. Her prose is cooler than Mailer's, denser than Didion's, more philosophical than McPhee's.
Elizabeth Hardwick. Sleepless Nights (1979) is essay-as-novel. Hardwick's New York Review of Books essays — she was a co-founder — established the NYRB as the central American venue for the long critical essay.
Mary McCarthy. Reviews and reportage in similar register.
Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). Arendt was a political philosopher, but the major works are essay-structured. Eichmann ran first as a five-part New Yorker series.
James Baldwin. Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), The Fire Next Time (1963). The major American essayist on race. Baldwin's prose was rhetorically Biblical, autobiographically searing, political without being polemical. The essay tradition's debt to Baldwin is considerable.
Norman Mailer. Advertisements for Myself (1959), The Armies of the Night (1968). The essay-as-performance.
The 1960s and 70s saw the rise of "New Journalism" — a hybrid form that brought literary techniques (scene-setting, dialogue, point-of-view, character interiority) into reporting. The dividing line between essay and journalism dissolved.
Tom Wolfe. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), The Right Stuff (1979), the famous 1973 anthology The New Journalism (with E.W. Johnson). Wolfe's prose used italics, exclamation marks, sound effects — typographic exuberance to match observational maximalism.
Hunter S. Thompson. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. "Gonzo" — first-person, intoxicated, mythologising. The most extreme version of the new-journalism voice.
Gay Talese. "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" (1966) — the most-cited piece of New Journalism. Talese never interviewed Sinatra; he reported around him for three months and built a 15,000-word essay-profile from observation.
Joan Didion (again). Didion's reporting (Salvador, Miami, Sentimental Journeys) crosses freely between essay and journalism.
Truman Capote. In Cold Blood (1966) — the novel-as-journalism — sits parallel to the essay tradition; reportage at book length organised novelistically.
The New Journalism legacy: most contemporary long-form magazine writing — the Atlantic profile, the New Yorker reportage, the New York Times Magazine feature — is in the New Journalism mode whether it credits the source or not.
The 1980s and 90s saw the consolidation of "lyric essay" as a sub-genre — fragmented, image-driven, prose-poetic, often deeply personal, formally innovative. Influenced by translation of European essayists (Benjamin, Adorno, Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida) and by the post-confessional poetry tradition.
Annie Dillard. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974, won the Pulitzer), Holy the Firm (1977), For the Time Being (1999). Nature writing as theological meditation, organised by image and association rather than argument.
Anne Carson. Eros the Bittersweet (1986), Plainwater (1995), Nox (2010). Classicist by training; her essays move between scholarly and lyric registers. Nox is a facsimile-printed elegy in book form, blurring essay, translation, and elegy.
Maggie Nelson. Bluets (2009) — 240 numbered prose-poem fragments meditating on the colour blue. The Argonauts (2015) — auto-theory weaving philosophy, queer theory, and motherhood. The most influential essayist of the 2010s for younger writers.
Eula Biss. Notes from No Man's Land (2009), On Immunity (2014). Researched lyric essays on race, vaccination, public goods.
Claudia Rankine. Citizen: An American Lyric (2014). Genre-blurring — essay-poem on race in America.
The lyric essay is the form most-taught in MFA programs in the 2020s; its market presence is far greater than its market share would suggest.
"Auto-theory" — an essay tradition mixing personal experience with theoretical (usually critical-theory, queer-theory, post-structuralist) framework — has been the dominant essay mode for younger writers in the 2010s and 2020s.
Roots: Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse (1977) and Camera Lucida (1980). Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, the French theorists writing autobiographically.
Contemporary practitioners: Maggie Nelson (above), Paul B. Preciado (Testo Junkie, 2008), Wayne Koestenbaum, Olivia Laing (The Lonely City), Jenny Offill (Dept. of Speculation), Jenny Boully, Saidiya Hartman (the "critical fabulation" approach in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments).
The mode invites criticism. Sceptics: it can be undisciplined ("here's my feeling, here's a Foucault citation that endorses my feeling"); it can be solipsistic; the theory often functions decoratively. Defenders: it acknowledges what conventional academic prose hides — the position of the writer, the embodied reader, the contingency of frame.
Whatever the merits, auto-theory is the dominant graduate-school essay register. Major MFA programs (Iowa, Michigan, Brown, NYU's Cultural Reporting and Criticism) train students substantially in it.
The 21st century revived the long-form political essay as a market force.
Ta-Nehisi Coates. "The Case for Reparations" (Atlantic, 2014). Between the World and Me (2015). The most-discussed political essay of the 2010s. Coates wrote in deliberate dialogue with Baldwin's The Fire Next Time — including the epistolary-to-son structure.
Roxane Gay. Bad Feminist (2014), Hunger (2017). Essay collections on feminism, race, body.
Rebecca Solnit. Men Explain Things to Me (2014). Solnit's essays gave English the term "mansplaining" (popularised, not coined by her). Hope in the Dark, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, the Walking books — her output is enormous.
Jia Tolentino. Trick Mirror (2019). Generational analysis at the boundary of cultural criticism and personal essay.
Zadie Smith. Changing My Mind (2009), Feel Free (2018), Intimations (2020). Smith's essays are among the most-read literary essays of the 21st century — the equivalent of Woolf's Common Reader for a contemporary audience.
Hilton Als. White Girls (2013). New Yorker theatre critic; the essays interleave criticism, autobiography, and queer-Black identity in a hybrid lyric-political mode.
The political essay's audience has been broader in the post-2014 period than at any time since Mailer-Sontag-Baldwin. Its formal range has been wider too.
The form is not Anglo-American.
French. Montaigne's heirs are continuous: Pascal's Pensées, La Bruyère's Caractères, Diderot, Rousseau (the Reveries), Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris, Roland Barthes, Cioran, Maurice Blanchot. The French essay is more philosophically-inflected than the English; it sits closer to philosophy than to journalism.
German. Lessing's Hamburg Dramaturgy, Schopenhauer's Parerga, Nietzsche's whole output (the aphoristic essay), Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno. The Frankfurt School's mid-century essay is canonical.
Latin American. Borges's essays (Otras Inquisiciones, 1952). Octavio Paz's The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950). Eduardo Galeano. Roberto Bolaño's posthumous essays. The Latin American essay is more transnational and less regionalist than the Anglo-American.
Japanese. The zuihitsu ("follow the brush") tradition runs from Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book (~1000 AD) and Kenkō's Essays in Idleness (1330) through to contemporary practitioners. Often more associative and image-driven than Western essay.
Russian. Lev Shestov, Andrey Bely, the Symbolist essayists. Joseph Brodsky's English-language essays (Less Than One, 1986).
The English-language essay is one tradition among many. Translation has become more vigorous in the 21st century; the world's essay traditions increasingly speak to each other.
The form's working venues, in declining importance from peak to present:
Long-form magazines. The New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper's, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, Granta. Print circulations declining; digital subscription models replacing them. Editorial tradition, line-editing rigour, fact-checking — partly continuous, partly thinning.
Quarterly literary magazines. n+1, The Point, Salmagundi, Hedgehog Review, The Hudson Review. Smaller circulation; greater editorial range; often the venue for the essays that get noticed and reprinted in best-of anthologies.
Online-only. The Atlantic and New Yorker run substantial digital-original essay departments. Aeon, Quanta, Wired, Atavist (defunct), Longreads — the 2010s' wave of digital essay venues. Many have shrunk; some have become the central venue for their topic (Aeon for popular philosophy).
Substack and the newsletter era. 2017-onward: writers publishing essay-newsletters directly to subscribers. Bypasses editorial infrastructure (and editorial constraint). Tyler Cowen's Marginal Revolution, Andrew Sullivan's The Weekly Dish, Bari Weiss's Common Sense, Anne Helen Petersen's Culture Study, Patti Davis Buena Vista. The model produces volume; whether it produces durable essays is a question for posterity.
Anthologies. The annual Best American Essays (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, since 1986; Robert Atwan's series, with rotating guest editors) is the single most-influential essay venue at the survey level.
This is genuinely contested, but here's a working consensus:
Voice. A reader recognises the writer in the prose. Not an arbitrary "personality" — a way of seeing that is consistent and distinct.
Movement. The piece thinks. It does not start at conclusion, accumulate evidence for the conclusion, and end at the conclusion. It begins by not knowing, complicates as it goes, and ends with something earned by the reading.
Specificity. Concrete particulars. Generalisation grounded in detail. Didion's noun-density. McPhee's research embedded in image.
Stakes. Something must be at stake for the writer. Pieces written for assignment without internal urgency feel like assigned writing. Pieces written from genuine question — even small — feel different.
Length earning itself. A 4,000-word essay must justify its length over a 1,000-word version. Many magazine essays don't; the form has natural temptations to padding.
Endings. The hardest part. An essay ending must do something the body of the essay didn't, while not being arbitrary. Bad endings either over-explain or veer to false uplift.
Phillip Lopate's introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay (1994) is the standard summary of the form. Robert Atwan's annual Best American Essays introductions are the most useful working anatomy.
Literary, film, music, theatre, art criticism is mostly essay. The greatest critics write in the essay tradition.
Literary. Edmund Wilson (Axel's Castle, 1931). Lionel Trilling (The Liberal Imagination, 1950). Frank Kermode. Helen Vendler on poetry. James Wood on the novel (How Fiction Works, 2008). Vivian Gornick's reading-as-essay (The Romance of the Ruins).
Film. Pauline Kael (I Lost It at the Movies, 1965). Roger Ebert (whose late blog essays exceeded his weekly reviews). Manny Farber. Andrew Sarris. J. Hoberman. Anthony Lane's New Yorker reviews. A.O. Scott. The recent generation: Justin Chang, K. Austin Collins, Beatrice Loayza.
Music. Greil Marcus (Mystery Train, Lipstick Traces). Lester Bangs. Robert Christgau. Ellen Willis. Recently: Amanda Petrusich, Hua Hsu, Carl Wilson.
Visual art. Clement Greenberg (decisive mid-century). Robert Hughes (The Shock of the New). T. J. Clark. Hilton Als (theatre and visual art).
Architecture. Reyner Banham. Ada Louise Huxtable. Witold Rybczynski. The recent generation: Alexandra Lange, Justin Davidson.
Criticism written as essay (rather than as report or review) carries the bulk of the literary work. The cultural conversation about books, films, and music is essay-mediated.
The web altered the essay's economic and editorial conditions, less than is sometimes claimed and more than is sometimes admitted.
Continuities. Long-form essays still exist. The Atlantic's 8,000-word feature essay is structurally what it was in 1990. The New Yorker's Talk of the Town and Critics columns are recognisable. Reading habits — long, attentive, sustained — persist for an audience.
Discontinuities. Headlines and openers carry more weight (the click decision is at the headline). "Pieces" are shorter on average. The economic model has shifted from advertising to subscription, which changes editorial incentives. Writers paid per piece, with no editorial overhead, are more numerous; the editorial filter is thinner.
The blog era (2002-2014ish). A genuinely productive period for the essay form. Daily Dish, Marginal Revolution, Crooked Timber, the Awl, the Hairpin, the Toast, Edge of the American West. The blog essay was shorter, more frequent, more personally addressed than the magazine essay. Many of the best post-2010 essayists came up through blogs.
The Substack era (2017-onward). Inheritors of the blog mode, with paid subscriptions. Mostly individual writers; some small magazines (Astral Codex Ten, Slow Boring, Persuasion). The economic logic favours strong personal brand over editorial team; the form's diversity is variable.
The essay tradition adapts to its delivery medium. The medium is not the form; the form is something the medium hosts or fails to host.
The form is taught in two places: undergraduate composition courses (where it is used as a vehicle for teaching argument) and MFA creative-nonfiction programs (where it is taught as a literary form).
The undergraduate "five-paragraph essay" — a thesis-statement-driven, schema-locked argument structure — is what most American adults associate with the word "essay." This is unfortunate. The literary essay is structurally almost the opposite: question-driven, exploratory, willing to revise itself in motion.
The MFA tradition began with the Iowa Writers' Workshop's Nonfiction Writing Program (founded 1976). Major programs now: Iowa, Michigan, Columbia, Hunter, Bennington, Brown, NYU's Cultural Reporting and Criticism. The training is workshop-based; the result is a recognisable mid-prestige essay style — researched, lyric-tending, often auto-theoretical.
Working manuals. Phillip Lopate's To Show and to Tell (2013). Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola's Tell It Slant. Vivian Gornick's The Situation and the Story (2001) — among the best brief manuals on essay structure.
The number of MFA-trained essayists has expanded the field's professional class but also produced a discernible house style. The most distinct contemporary essayists tend to come from outside the MFA pipeline — journalists, critics, working writers from other fields who turn to essay.
If you read only these — twenty essays across the form's range:
Montaigne — "Of Cannibals" (Book I, Ch. 31).
Bacon — "Of Studies."
Swift — "A Modest Proposal" (1729).
Lamb — "Dream-Children: A Reverie" (1822).
Hazlitt — "On the Pleasure of Hating" (1826).
Emerson — "Self-Reliance" (1841).
Thoreau — "Civil Disobedience" (1849).
Mill — "On Liberty" (1859, the long argumentative essay).
Woolf — "The Death of the Moth" (1942, posthumous).
Orwell — "Politics and the English Language" (1946).
White — "Once More to the Lake" (1941).
Baldwin — "Notes of a Native Son" (1955).
Sontag — "Notes on Camp" (1964).
Didion — "Goodbye to All That" (1967).
Wolfe — "The Pump House Gang" (1968).
Talese — "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" (1966).
Wallace — "Consider the Lobster" (2004).
Coates — "The Case for Reparations" (2014).
Tolentino — "Always Be Optimizing" (in Trick Mirror, 2019).
Smith — "Joy" (in Feel Free, 2018).
Twenty essays is a working syllabus. They span 440 years and most of the form's tonal range. The reader who knows them has a basis for everything else.
Worth taking seriously: the essay form has been criticised, sometimes well.
It mistakes voice for thought. A confident, well-paced, literary voice can disguise weak argument, factual sloppiness, and decorative reasoning. The standard New Yorker essay is sometimes criticised for exactly this — the prose is good enough that the absence of underlying claim goes unnoticed.
It privileges the personal. The Auto-theory and lyric-essay traditions have brought autobiography into critical writing in ways that critics worry are solipsistic. "Why am I in this essay?" is a question the form often fails to answer.
It is incompatible with rigorous knowledge production. An essay can illuminate; it cannot prove. Major social-science questions are not actually settled by essays. The lit-mag-essay culture sometimes treats brilliantly-written claims as more decisive than they are.
The market favours certain affect. Confident, lyrical, mildly heterodox: the magazine sweet spot. Genuinely difficult thinking, slow argument, qualified conclusion — harder to sell.
These critiques don't kill the form. They specify what it is good for and what it isn't. The essay is a vehicle for thinking-in-public, not for empirical settlement. The category mistake is treating it as more.
Where the form sits in 2026.
Working essayists. Smith, Tolentino, Coates, Solnit, Als, Lerner, Lockwood, Petrusich, Hsu, Davies, Tóibín, Cusk, Solnit, Maggie Nelson. The list is long. The form is healthy at the top end.
Newsletter writers. Substack, Beehiiv, ghost-hosted. Anne Helen Petersen, Tyler Cowen, Andrew Sullivan, Heather Cox Richardson, Bari Weiss, Yascha Mounk, Bret Stephens, Patrick Wyman, Robin Sloan, Zeynep Tufekci, Maria Popova. The newsletter essay is the dominant new venue.
Magazines. The New Yorker, Atlantic, NYRB, LRB, Harper's, n+1, the Believer, Granta. Quality varies; presence is durable. Some smaller publications (the Drift, Compact, Wisecrack) have grown.
Anthologies. Best American Essays (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, annual). Granta's "Best of Young British Novelists" tracks essayists too. The Pushcart Prize tracks small-press essay.
Audio. The essay has migrated partly to podcasting — Sam Harris's Making Sense, Tyler Cowen's Conversations, Ezra Klein, Tim Ferriss, Andrew Roberts. The audio essay is a real form, though distinct from the written.
The form's anxieties (decline of attention spans, decline of magazines, AI-generated text) are real but oversold. The audience is smaller than mass-market in any given year, but the audience for thoughtful prose is more durable than the audiences for many other media.
Generative AI can produce competent essay-like prose. Can it write essays?
The honest answer in 2026 is: it can produce essay-shaped artefacts, often persuasively. It can imitate Montaigne, Didion, Sontag, Tolentino. The model output reads as essay; sometimes as good essay.
What it cannot do (yet, reliably): originate the question that drives the essay. The essay is a record of mind making sense of question; if the question is not the writer's, the essay is performance, not discovery. Models prompted to "write a Didion essay about X" produce convincing prose without the underlying anxiety that makes Didion's prose what it is.
This may change. It may be illusory; the apparent gap between AI-written essay and human-written essay may close to zero across the next 5-10 years. Or it may not — the form may turn out to require something models don't have, namely a stake.
What is already changing: the economics. AI-written content is flooding the long-tail of the market. Editorial judgment becomes scarcer and more valuable. Recognised essayists (Smith, Tolentino, Coates) probably become more valuable, not less. The middle of the market — competent-but-not-distinct magazine writers — is genuinely threatened.
The form will survive. The market for it will reorganise. Some of the writers who currently subsist will not. The reader's interest in genuine voice probably increases, not decreases.
↑ Montaigne, the philosopher of self-knowledge
Watch · Zadie Smith on White Teeth and the essayist's voice
Watch · The editor of The New Yorker on helping writers find their voice
Three paths.
Read first. Read the twenty essays in Chapter XIX. Read Lopate's Art of the Personal Essay anthology. Read whatever current essayist makes you want to write — the impulse to imitate is the start of finding voice.
Practice in low-stakes venues. Substack, Medium, a personal blog, a Notion-published page. Write 800-2,000 word pieces regularly. Don't pre-commit to publication; some pieces will be drafts for thinking, not finished work.
Read your own drafts as critic. Most amateur essays have one good essay buried in three bad ones — a strong middle, weak opening, mistaken ending. The skill is identifying which paragraph is the actual essay and rewriting around it. Vivian Gornick's The Situation and the Story is the canonical guide to this excavation.
If serious. An MFA in nonfiction is the formal path. The major programs (Iowa, Hunter, Columbia, NYU CRC, Bennington) open doors and provide workshops. They do not produce essayists; the work is the writer's. They produce networks, deadlines, and reading lists.
If less serious. Take a Catapult or Lighthouse Writers' Workshop class. Online generative-writing courses. The point of the class is the deadline and the readers, not the curriculum.
Three claims.
It is the form that records the mind. Other forms — novels, poems, treatises — exist for other reasons. The essay exists specifically to track the movement of attention across an idea. No other form does this directly. The essay is the literary instrument for thinking-in-public.
It is the durable form for arguments that cannot be settled by data. Many of the most important questions humans face — how to live, what to value, what we owe each other, what art is, what death is — are not empirically settleable. The essay handles them. Not always well, but the form is fit for the purpose where the formal sciences are not.
It is one of the few literary forms where the marginal cost of producing one is low and the marginal value of doing it well is high. A good 2,000-word essay can be read in 15 minutes and remembered for years. Per minute of writer's effort and per minute of reader's attention, the essay's information-and-feeling density is competitive with any other form.
The essay is older than the novel, older than journalism, older than the modern academic article. It will outlast all three.
Four likely directions.
The split between editorial and direct-to-reader. Substack-and-similar will continue to draw essayists from magazine homes. The traditional magazines will continue to consolidate at the top — fewer venues, higher quality. The middle (mid-circulation literary magazines) will be the most pressured.
AI-driven production. Generated text will flood the low-end market. The premium will move to recognisably human voice — meaning specific writers will become more valuable, less replaceable. The economic pressure on competent-but-not-distinct essayists will intensify.
International translation. The 2010s saw a major expansion of essay translation (Knausgaard, Cusk, Lispector, Han Kang). The 2020s and 2030s likely see more — Korean, Japanese, Latin American, African essay traditions becoming more visible to English-language readers.
Form pressure. The 4,000-8,000-word magazine essay may compress (back toward the 2,000-word periodical-essay length) or expand (toward the book-length lyric essay of Maggie Nelson). Both pressures exist; both produce interesting work.
The essay in 2035 will look more like the essay in 1925 than people expect. The form is older than its current institutions and more durable than any individual platform.
The Essay Tradition — Volume XI, Deck 11 of The Deck Catalog. Set in EB Garamond italic with monospace metadata. Cream paper #f9f5eb; burgundy and olive accents.
Twenty-eight leaves on the form Montaigne invented to think in public. Que sais-je? — what do I know? Still the form's question.
↑ Vol. XI · Lit. · Deck 11