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One hundred great essays

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One Hundred Great Essays First Edition

• ISBN-10 0321093747
• ISBN-13 978-0321093745
• Edition First Edition
• Publisher Longman
• Publication date December 18, 2001
• Language English
• Dimensions 5.3 x 1.6 x 8.2 inches
• Print length 832 pages
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Longman; First Edition (December 18, 2001)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 832 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0321093747
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0321093745
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.85 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.3 x 1.6 x 8.2 inches
• #2,161 in Creative Writing & Composition
• #14,562 in Fiction Writing Reference (Books)
• #15,576 in Essays (Books)

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The 25 Greatest Essay Collections of All Time

Today marks the release of Aleksandar Hemon’s excellent book of personal essays, The Book of My Lives , which we loved, and which we’re convinced deserves a place in the literary canon. To that end, we were inspired to put together our list of the greatest essay collections of all time, from the classic to the contemporary, from the personal to the critical. In making our choices, we’ve steered away from posthumous omnibuses (Michel de Montaigne’s Complete Essays , the collected Orwell, etc.) and multi-author compilations, and given what might be undue weight to our favorite writers (as one does). After the jump, our picks for the 25 greatest essay collections of all time. Feel free to disagree with us, praise our intellect, or create an entirely new list in the comments.

The Book of My Lives , Aleksandar Hemon

Hemon’s memoir in essays is in turns wryly hilarious, intellectually searching, and deeply troubling. It’s the life story of a fascinating, quietly brilliant man, and it reads as such. For fans of chess and ill-advised theme parties and growing up more than once.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem , Joan Didion

Well, obviously. Didion’s extraordinary book of essays, expertly surveying both her native California in the 1960s and her own internal landscape with clear eyes and one eyebrow raised ever so slightly. This collection, her first, helped establish the idea of journalism as art, and continues to put wind in the sails of many writers after her, hoping to move in that Didion direction.

Pulphead , John Jeremiah Sullivan

This was one of those books that this writer deemed required reading for all immediate family and friends. Sullivan’s sharply observed essays take us from Christian rock festivals to underground caves to his own home, and introduce us to 19-century geniuses, imagined professors and Axl Rose. Smart, curious, and humane, this is everything an essay collection should be.

The Boys of My Youth , Jo Ann Beard

Another memoir-in-essays, or perhaps just a collection of personal narratives, Jo Ann Beard’s award-winning volume is a masterpiece. Not only does it include the luminous, emotionally destructive “The Fourth State of the Matter,” which we’ve already implored you to read , but also the incredible “Bulldozing the Baby,” which takes on a smaller tragedy: a three-year-old Beard’s separation from her doll Hal. “The gorgeous thing about Hal,” she tells us, “was that not only was he my friend, he was also my slave. I made the majority of our decisions, including the bathtub one, which in retrospect was the beginning of the end.”

Consider the Lobster , David Foster Wallace

This one’s another “duh” moment, at least if you’re a fan of the literary essay. One of the most brilliant essayists of all time, Wallace pushes the boundaries (of the form, of our patience, of his own brain) and comes back with a classic collection of writing on everything from John Updike to, well, lobsters. You’ll laugh out loud right before you rethink your whole life. And then repeat.

Notes of a Native Son , James Baldwin

Baldwin’s most influential work is a witty, passionate portrait of black life and social change in America in the 1940s and early 1950s. His essays, like so many of the greats’, are both incisive social critiques and rigorous investigations into the self, told with a perfect tension between humor and righteous fury.

Naked , David Sedaris

His essays often read more like short stories than they do social criticism (though there’s a healthy, if perhaps implied, dose of that slippery subject), but no one makes us laugh harder or longer. A genius of the form.

Against Interpretation , Susan Sontag

This collection, Sontag’s first, is a dazzling feat of intellectualism. Her essays dissect not only art but the way we think about art, imploring us to “reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it.” It also contains the brilliant “Notes on ‘Camp,'” one of our all-time favorites.

The Common Reader , Virginia Woolf

Woolf is a literary giant for a reason — she was as incisive and brilliant a critic as she was a novelist. These witty essays, written for the common reader (“He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole- a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing”), are as illuminating and engrossing as they were when they were written.

Teaching a Stone to Talk , Annie Dillard

This is Dillard’s only book of essays, but boy is it a blazingly good one. The slender volume, filled with examinations of nature both human and not, is deft of thought and tongue, and well worth anyone’s time. As the Chicago Sun-Times ‘s Edward Abbey gushed, “This little book is haloed and informed throughout by Dillard’s distinctive passion and intensity, a sort of intellectual radiance that reminds me both Thoreau and Emily Dickinson.”

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man , Henry Louis Gates Jr.

In this eloquent volume of essays, all but one of which were originally published in the New Yorker , Gates argues against the notion of the singularly representable “black man,” preferring to represent him in a myriad of diverse profiles, from James Baldwin to Colin Powell. Humane, incisive, and satisfyingly journalistic, Gates cobbles together the ultimate portrait of the 20th-century African-American male by refusing to cobble it together, and raises important questions about race and identity even as he entertains.

Otherwise Known As the Human Condition , Geoff Dyer

This book of essays, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year of its publication, covers 25 years of the uncategorizable, inimitable Geoff Dyer’s work — casually erudite and yet liable to fascinate anyone wandering in the door, witty and breathing and full of truth. As Sam Lipsyte said, “You read Dyer for his caustic wit, of course, his exquisite and perceptive crankiness, and his deep and exciting intellectual connections, but from these enthralling rants and cultural investigations there finally emerges another Dyer, a generous seeker of human feeling and experience, a man perhaps closer than he thinks to what he believes his hero Camus achieved: ‘a heart free of bitterness.'”

Art and Ardor , Cynthia Ozick

Look, Cynthia Ozick is a genius. One of David Foster Wallace’s favorite writers, and one of ours, Ozick has no less than seven essay collections to her name, and we could have chosen any one of them, each sharper and more perfectly self-conscious than the last. This one, however, includes her stunner “A Drugstore in Winter,” which was chosen by Joyce Carol Oates for The Best American Essays of the Century , so we’ll go with it.

No More Nice Girls , Ellen Willis

The venerable Ellen Willis was the first pop music critic for The New Yorker , and a rollicking anti-authoritarian, feminist, all-around bad-ass woman who had a hell of a way with words. This collection examines the women’s movement, the plight of the aging radical, race relations, cultural politics, drugs, and Picasso. Among other things.

The War Against Cliché , Martin Amis

As you know if you’ve ever heard him talk , Martin Amis is not only a notorious grouch but a sharp critical mind, particularly when it comes to literature. That quality is on full display in this collection, which spans nearly 30 years and twice as many subjects, from Vladimir Nabokov (his hero) to chess to writing about sex. Love him or hate him, there’s no denying that he’s a brilliant old grump.

Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts , Clive James

James’s collection is a strange beast, not like any other essay collection on this list but its own breed. An encyclopedia of modern culture, the book collects 110 new biographical essays, which provide more than enough room for James to flex his formidable intellect and curiosity, as he wanders off on tangents, anecdotes, and cultural criticism. It’s not the only who’s who you need, but it’s a who’s who you need.

I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman , Nora Ephron

Oh Nora, we miss you. Again, we could have picked any of her collections here — candid, hilarious, and willing to give it to you straight, she’s like a best friend and mentor in one, only much more interesting than any of either you’ve ever had.

Arguably , Christopher Hitchens

No matter what you think of his politics (or his rhetorical strategies), there’s no denying that Christopher Hitchens was one of the most brilliant minds — and one of the most brilliant debaters — of the century. In this collection, packed with cultural commentary, literary journalism, and political writing, he is at his liveliest, his funniest, his exactingly wittiest. He’s also just as caustic as ever.

The Solace of Open Spaces , Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich is a poet, and in this collection, you’ll know it. In 1976, she moved to Wyoming and became a cowherd, and nearly a decade later, she published this lovely, funny set of essays about rural life in the American West.”Keenly observed the world is transformed,” she writes. “The landscape is engorged with detail, every movement on it chillingly sharp. The air between people is charged. Days unfold, bathed in their own music. Nights become hallucinatory; dreams, prescient.”

The Braindead Megaphone , George Saunders

Saunders may be the man of the moment, but he’s been at work for a long while, and not only on his celebrated short stories. His single collection of essays applies the same humor and deliciously slant view to the real world — which manages to display nearly as much absurdity as one of his trademark stories.

Against Joie de Vivre , Phillip Lopate

“Over the years,” the title essay begins, “I have developed a distaste for the spectacle of joie de vivre , the knack of knowing how to live.” Lopate goes on to dissect, in pleasantly sardonic terms, the modern dinner party. Smart and thought-provoking throughout (and not as crotchety as all that), this collection is conversational but weighty, something to be discussed at length with friends at your next — oh well, you know.

Sex and the River Styx , Edward Hoagland

Edward Hoagland, who John Updike deemed “the best essayist of my generation,” has a long and storied career and a fat bibliography, so we hesitate to choose such a recent installment in the writer’s canon. Then again, Garrison Keillor thinks it’s his best yet , so perhaps we’re not far off. Hoagland is a great nature writer (name checked by many as the modern Thoreau) but in truth, he’s just as fascinated by humanity, musing that “human nature is interstitial with nature, and not to be shunned by a naturalist.” Elegant and thoughtful, Hoagland may warn us that he’s heading towards the River Styx, but we’ll hang on to him a while longer.

Changing My Mind , Zadie Smith

Smith may be best known for her novels (and she should be), but to our eyes she is also emerging as an excellent essayist in her own right, passionate and thoughtful. Plus, any essay collection that talks about Barack Obama via Pygmalion is a winner in our book.

My Misspent Youth , Meghan Daum

Like so many other writers on this list, Daum dives head first into the culture and comes up with meat in her mouth. Her voice is fresh and her narratives daring, honest and endlessly entertaining.

The White Album , Joan Didion

Yes, Joan Didion is on this list twice, because Joan Didion is the master of the modern essay, tearing at our assumptions and building our world in brisk, clever strokes. Deal.

Make Lists, Not War

The meta-lists website, best essays of all time – ranked.

A reader suggested I create a meta-list of the best essays of all time, so I did.  I found over 12 best essays lists and several essay anthologies and combined the essays into one meta-list.  The meta-list below includes every essay that was on at least two of the original source lists. They are organized by rank, that is, with the essays on the most lists at the top. To see the same list organized chronologically, go HERE .

Note 1:  Some of the essays are actually chapters from books.  In such cases, I have identified the source book.

Note 2: Some of the essays are book-length, such as Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own .  One book listed as an essay by two listers – Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet – is also regularly categorized as a work of fiction.

On 11 lists James Baldwin – Notes of a Native Son (1955)

On 6 lists George Orwell – Shooting an Elephant (1936) E.B. White – Once More to the Lake (1941) Joan Didion – Goodbye To All That (1968)

On 5 lists Joan Didion – On Keeping A Notebook (1968) Annie Dillard – Total Eclipse (1982) Jo Ann Beard – The Fourth State of Matter (1996) David Foster Wallace – A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again (1996)

On 4 lists William Hazlitt – On the Pleasure of Hating (1823) Ralph Waldo Emerson – Self-Reliance (1841) Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own (1928) Virginia Woolf – The Death of a Moth (1942) George Orwell – Such, Such Were the Joys (1952) Joan Didion – In Bed (1968) Amy Tan – Mother Tongue (1991) David Foster Wallace – Consider The Lobster (2005)

On 3 lists Jonathan Swift – A Modest Proposal  (1729) Virginia Woolf – Street Haunting: A London Adventure (1930) John McPhee – The Search for Marvin Gardens (1972) Joan Didion – The White Album (1968-1978) Eudora Welty – The Little Store (1978) Phillip Lopate – Against Joie de Vivre (1989)

On 2 lists Sei Shonagon – Hateful Things (from The Pillow Book ) (1002) Yoshida Kenko – Essays in Idleness (1332) Michel de Montaigne – On Some Verses of Virgil (1580) Robert Burton – Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) John Milton – Areopagitica  (1644) William Hazlitt – On Going a Journey (1822) Charles Lamb – The Superannuated Man (1823) Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience (1849) Henry David Thoreau – Where I Lived, and What I Lived For (from  Walden ) (1854) Henry David Thoreau – Economy (from  Walden ) (1854) Henry David Thoreau – Walking (1861) Robert Louis Stevenson – The Lantern-Bearers (1888) Zora Neale Hurston – How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928) George Orwell – A Hanging (1931) Junichiro Tanizaki – In Praise of Shadows (1933) Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet (1935) James Agee and Walker Evans – Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) Simone Weil – On Human Personality (1943) M.F.K. Fisher – The Flaw (1943) Vladimir Nabokov – Speak, Memory (1951, revised 1966) Mary McCarthy – Artists in Uniform: A Story (1953) E.B. White – Goodbye to Forty-Eighth Street (1957) Martin Luther King, Jr. – Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963) Joseph Mitchell – Joe Gould’s Secret (1964) Susan Sontag – Against Interpretation (1966) Edward Hoagland – The Courage of Turtles (1970) Annie Dillard – Seeing (from  Pilgrim at Tinker Creek ) (1974) Maxine Hong Kingston – No Name Woman (from The Woman Warrior ) (1976) Roland Barthes – Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1982) Annie Dillard – Living Like Weasels (1982) Gloria E. Anzaldúa – How to Tame a Wild Tongue (1987) Italo Calvino – Exactitude (1988) Richard Rodriguez – Late Victorians (1990) David Wojnarowicz – Being Queer in America: A Journal of Disintegration (1991) Seymour Krim – To My Brothers & Sisters in the Failure Business (1991) Anne Carson – The Anthropology of Water (1995) Susan Sontag – Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) Etel Adnan – In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005) Paul LaFarge – Destroy All Monsters (2006) Brian Doyle – Joyas Voladoras (2012)

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100 Must-Read Essay Collections

100 awesome essay collections you won't want to miss!

Rebecca Hussey

Rebecca holds a PhD in English and is a professor at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut. She teaches courses in composition, literature, and the arts. When she’s not reading or grading papers, she’s hanging out with her husband and son and/or riding her bike and/or buying books. She can't get enough of reading and writing about books, so she writes the bookish newsletter "Reading Indie," focusing on small press books and translations. Newsletter: Reading Indie Twitter: @ofbooksandbikes

View All posts by Rebecca Hussey

There’s something about a shiny new collection of essays that makes my heart beat a little faster. If you feel the same way, can we be friends? If not, might I suggest that perhaps you just haven’t found the right collection yet? I don’t expect everyone to love the thought of sitting down with a nice, juicy personal essay, but I also think the genre gets a bad rap because people associate it with the kind of thing they had to write in school.

Well, essays don’t have to be like the kind of thing you wrote in school. Essays can be anything, really. They can be personal, confessional, argumentative, informative, funny, sad, shocking, sexy, and all of the above. The best essayists can make any subject interesting. If I love an essayist, I’ll read whatever they write. I’ll follow their minds anywhere. Because that’s really what I want out of an essay — the sense that I’m spending time with an interesting mind. I want a companionable, challenging, smart, surprising voice in my head.

So below is my list, not of essay collections I think everybody “must read,” even if that’s what my title says, but collections I hope you will consider checking out if you want to.

1. Against Interpretation — Susan Sontag

2. Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere — André Aciman

3. American Romances — Rebecca Brown

4. Art & Ardor — Cynthia Ozick

5. The Art of the Personal Essay — anthology, edited by Phillip Lopate

6. Bad Feminist — Roxane Gay

7. The Best American Essays of the Century — anthology, edited by Joyce Carol Oates

8. The Best American Essays series — published every year, series edited by Robert Atwan

9. Book of Days — Emily Fox Gordon

10. The Boys of My Youth — Jo Ann Beard

11. The Braindead Megaphone — George Saunders

12. Broken Republic: Three Essays — Arundhati Roy

13. Changing My Mind — Zadie Smith

14. A Collection of Essays — George Orwell

15. The Common Reader — Virginia Woolf

16. Consider the Lobster — David Foster Wallace

17. The Crack-up — F. Scott Fitzgerald

18. Discontent and its Civilizations — Mohsin Hamid

19. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric — Claudia Rankine

20. Dreaming of Hitler — Daphne Merkin

21. Self-Reliance and Other Essays — Ralph Waldo Emerson

22. The Empathy Exams — Leslie Jameson

23. Essays After Eighty — Donald Hall

24. Essays in Idleness — Yoshida Kenko

25. The Essays of Elia — Charles Lamb

26. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader — Anne Fadiman

27. A Field Guide to Getting Lost — Rebecca Solnit

28. Findings — Kathleen Jamie

29. The Fire Next Time — James Baldwin

30. The Folded Clock — Heidi Julavits

31. Forty-One False Starts — Janet Malcolm

32. How To Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America — Kiese Laymon

33. I Feel Bad About My Neck — Nora Ephron

34. I Just Lately Started Buying Wings — Kim Dana Kupperman

35. In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction — anthology, edited by Lee Gutkind

36. In Praise of Shadows — Junichiro Tanizaki

37. In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens — Alice Walker

38. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? — Mindy Kaling

39. I Was Told There’d Be Cake — Sloane Crosley

40. Karaoke Culture — Dubravka Ugresic

41. Labyrinths — Jorge Luis Borges

42. Living, Thinking, Looking — Siri Hustvedt

43. Loitering — Charles D’Ambrosio

44. Lunch With a Bigot — Amitava Kumar

45. Madness, Rack, and Honey — Mary Ruefle

46. Magic Hours — Tom Bissell

47. Meatless Days — Sara Suleri

48. Meaty — Samantha Irby

49. Meditations from a Movable Chair — Andre Dubus

50. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood — Mary McCarthy

51. Me Talk Pretty One Day — David Sedaris

52. Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal — Wendy S. Walters

53. My 1980s and Other Essays — Wayne Koestenbaum

54. The Next American Essay, The Lost Origins of the Essay, and The Making of the American Essay — anthologies, edited by John D’Agata

55. The Norton Book of Personal Essays — anthology, edited by Joseph Epstein

56. Notes from No Man’s Land — Eula Biss

57. Notes of a Native Son — James Baldwin

58. Not That Kind of Girl — Lena Dunham

59. On Beauty and Being Just — Elaine Scarry

60. Once I Was Cool — Megan Stielstra

61. 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write — Sarah Ruhl

62. On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored — Adam Phillips

63. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence — Adrienne Rich

64. The Opposite of Loneliness — Marina Keegan

65. Otherwise Known as the Human Condition — Geoff Dyer

66. Paris to the Moon — Adam Gopnik

67. Passions of the Mind — A.S. Byatt

68. The Pillow Book — Sei Shonagon

69. A Place to Live — Natalia Ginzburg

70. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination — Toni Morrison

71. Pulphead — John Jeremiah Sullivan

72. Selected Essays — Michel de Montaigne

73. Shadow and Act — Ralph Ellison

74. Sidewalks — Valeria Luiselli

75. Sister Outsider — Audre Lorde

76. The Size of Thoughts — Nicholson Baker

77. Slouching Towards Bethlehem — Joan Didion

78. The Souls of Black Folk — W. E. B. Du Bois

79. The Story About the Story — anthology, edited by J.C. Hallman

80. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again — David Foster Wallace

81. Ten Years in the Tub — Nick Hornby

82. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man — Henry Louis Gates

83. This Is Running for Your Life — Michelle Orange

84. This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage — Ann Patchett

85. Tiny Beautiful Things — Cheryl Strayed

86. Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American Culture — Gerald Early

87. Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints — Joan Acocella

88. The Unspeakable — Meghan Daum

89. Vermeer in Bosnia — Lawrence Weschler

90. The Wave in the Mind — Ursula K. Le Guin

91. We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think — Shirley Hazzard

92. We Should All Be Feminists — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi

93. What Are People For? — Wendell Berry

94. When I Was a Child I Read Books — Marilynne Robinson

95. The White Album — Joan Didion

96. White Girls — Hilton Als

97. The Woman Warrior — Maxine Hong Kinston

98. The Writing Life — Annie Dillard

99. Writing With Intent — Margaret Atwood

100. You Don’t Have to Like Me — Alida Nugent

If you have a favorite essay collection I’ve missed here, let me know in the comments!

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The Ten Best American Essays Since 1950, According to Robert Atwan

in Books , Literature | November 15th, 2012 3 Comments

“Essays can be lots of things, maybe too many things,” writes Atwan in his fore­ward to the 2012 install­ment in the Best Amer­i­can series, “but at the core of the genre is an unmis­tak­able recep­tiv­i­ty to the ever-shift­ing process­es of our minds and moods. If there is any essen­tial char­ac­ter­is­tic we can attribute to the essay, it may be this: that the truest exam­ples of the form enact that ever-shift­ing process, and in that enact­ment we can find the basis for the essay’s qual­i­fi­ca­tion to be regard­ed seri­ous­ly as imag­i­na­tive lit­er­a­ture and the essay­ist’s claim to be tak­en seri­ous­ly as a cre­ative writer.”

In 2001 Atwan and Joyce Car­ol Oates took on the daunt­ing task of trac­ing that ever-shift­ing process through the pre­vi­ous 100 years for  The Best Amer­i­can Essays of the Cen­tu­ry . Recent­ly Atwan returned with a more focused selec­tion for  Pub­lish­ers Week­ly :  “The Top 10 Essays Since 1950.”  To pare it all down to such a small num­ber, Atwan decid­ed to reserve the “New Jour­nal­ism” cat­e­go­ry, with its many mem­o­rable works by Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Michael Herr and oth­ers, for some future list. He also made a point of select­ing the best essays , as opposed to exam­ples from the best essay­ists. “A list of the top ten essay­ists since 1950 would fea­ture some dif­fer­ent writ­ers.”

We were inter­est­ed to see that six of the ten best essays are avail­able for free read­ing online. Here is Atwan’s list, along with links to those essays that are on the Web:

• James Bald­win, “Notes of a Native Son,” 1955 (Read it here .)
• Nor­man Mail­er, “The White Negro,” 1957 (Read it here .)
• Susan Son­tag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” 1964 (Read it here .)
• John McPhee, “The Search for Mar­vin Gar­dens,” 1972 (Read it here with a sub­scrip­tion.)
• Joan Did­ion, “The White Album,” 1979
• Annie Dil­lard, “Total Eclipse,” 1982
• Phillip Lopate, “Against Joie de Vivre,” 1986 (Read it here .)
• Edward Hoagland, “Heav­en and Nature,” 1988
• Jo Ann Beard, “The Fourth State of Mat­ter,” 1996 (Read it here .)
• David Fos­ter Wal­lace, “Con­sid­er the Lob­ster,” 2004 (Read it here  in a ver­sion dif­fer­ent from the one pub­lished in his 2005 book of the same name.)

“To my mind,” writes Atwan in his arti­cle, “the best essays are deeply per­son­al (that does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly mean auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal) and deeply engaged with issues and ideas. And the best essays show that the name of the genre is also a verb, so they demon­strate a mind in process–reflecting, try­ing-out, essay­ing.”

To read more of Atwan’s com­men­tary, see his  arti­cle in Pub­lish­ers Week­ly .

The pho­to above of Susan Son­tag was tak­en by Peter Hujar in 1966.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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The Best Reviewed Essay Collections of 2021

Featuring joan didion, rachel kushner, hanif abdurraqib, ann patchett, jenny diski, and more.

Well, friends, another grim and grueling plague year is drawing to a close, and that can mean only one thing: it’s time to put on our Book Marks stats hats and tabulate the best reviewed books of the past twelve months.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2021, in the categories of (deep breath): Memoir and Biography ; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror ; Short Story Collections ; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature; Literature in Translation; General Fiction; and General Nonfiction.

Today’s installment: Essay Collections .

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

1. These Precious Days by Ann Patchett (Harper)

21 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed Read Ann Patchett on creating the work space you need, here

“… excellent … Patchett has a talent for friendship and celebrates many of those friends here. She writes with pure love for her mother, and with humor and some good-natured exasperation at Karl, who is such a great character he warrants a book of his own. Patchett’s account of his feigned offer to buy a woman’s newly adopted baby when she expresses unwarranted doubts is priceless … The days that Patchett refers to are precious indeed, but her writing is anything but. She describes deftly, with a line or a look, and I considered the absence of paragraphs freighted with adjectives to be a mercy. I don’t care about the hue of the sky or the shade of the couch. That’s not writing; it’s decorating. Or hiding. Patchett’s heart, smarts and 40 years of craft create an economy that delivers her perfectly understated stories emotionally whole. Her writing style is most gloriously her own.”

–Alex Witchel ( The New York Times Book Review )

2. Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion (Knopf)

14 Rave • 12 Positive • 6 Mixed Read an excerpt from Let Me Tell You What I Mean here

“In five decades’ worth of essays, reportage and criticism, Didion has documented the charade implicit in how things are, in a first-person, observational style that is not sacrosanct but common-sensical. Seeing as a way of extrapolating hypocrisy, disingenuousness and doubt, she’ll notice the hydrangeas are plastic and mention it once, in passing, sorting the scene. Her gaze, like a sentry on the page, permanently trained on what is being disguised … The essays in Let Me Tell You What I Mean are at once funny and touching, roving and no-nonsense. They are about humiliation and about notions of rightness … Didion’s pen is like a periscope onto the creative mind—and, as this collection demonstrates, it always has been. These essays offer a direct line to what’s in the offing.”

–Durga Chew-Bose ( The New York Times Book Review )

3. Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (Viking)

12 Rave • 13 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Orwell’s Roses here

“… on its simplest level, a tribute by one fine essayist of the political left to another of an earlier generation. But as with any of Solnit’s books, such a description would be reductive: the great pleasure of reading her is spending time with her mind, its digressions and juxtapositions, its unexpected connections. Only a few contemporary writers have the ability to start almost anywhere and lead the reader on paths that, while apparently meandering, compel unfailingly and feel, by the end, cosmically connected … Somehow, Solnit’s references to Ross Gay, Michael Pollan, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Peter Coyote (to name but a few) feel perfectly at home in the narrative; just as later chapters about an eighteenth-century portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds and a visit to the heart of the Colombian rose-growing industry seem inevitable and indispensable … The book provides a captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker … And, movingly, she takes the time to find the traces of Orwell the gardener and lover of beauty in his political novels, and in his insistence on the value and pleasure of things .”

–Claire Messud ( Harper’s )

4. Girlhood by Melissa Febos (Bloomsbury)

16 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Girlhood here

“Every once in a while, a book comes along that feels so definitive, so necessary, that not only do you want to tell everyone to read it now, but you also find yourself wanting to go back in time and tell your younger self that you will one day get to read something that will make your life make sense. Melissa Febos’s fierce nonfiction collection, Girlhood , might just be that book. Febos is one of our most passionate and profound essayists … Girlhood …offers us exquisite, ferocious language for embracing self-pleasure and self-love. It’s a book that women will wish they had when they were younger, and that they’ll rejoice in having now … Febos is a balletic memoirist whose capacious gaze can take in so many seemingly disparate things and unfurl them in a graceful, cohesive way … Intellectual and erotic, engaging and empowering[.]”

–Michelle Hart ( Oprah Daily )

5. Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told by Jenny Diski (Bloomsbury)

14 Rave • 7 Positive

“[Diski’s] reputation as an original, witty and cant-free thinker on the way we live now should be given a significant boost. Her prose is elegant and amused, as if to counter her native melancholia and includes frequent dips into memorable images … Like the ideal artist Henry James conjured up, on whom nothing is lost, Diski notices everything that comes her way … She is discerning about serious topics (madness and death) as well as less fraught material, such as fashion … in truth Diski’s first-person voice is like no other, selectively intimate but not overbearingly egotistic, like, say, Norman Mailer’s. It bears some resemblance to Joan Didion’s, if Didion were less skittish and insistently stylish and generated more warmth. What they have in common is their innate skepticism and the way they ask questions that wouldn’t occur to anyone else … Suffice it to say that our culture, enmeshed as it is in carefully arranged snapshots of real life, needs Jenny Diski, who, by her own admission, ‘never owned a camera, never taken one on holiday.’” It is all but impossible not to warm up to a writer who observes herself so keenly … I, in turn, wish there were more people around who thought like Diski. The world would be a more generous, less shallow and infinitely more intriguing place.”

–Daphne Merkin ( The New York Times Book Review )

6. The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020 by Rachel Kushner (Scribner)

12 Rave • 7 Positive Listen to an interview with Rachel Kushner here

“Whether she’s writing about Jeff Koons, prison abolition or a Palestinian refugee camp in Jerusalem, [Kushner’s] interested in appearances, and in the deeper currents a surface detail might betray … Her writing is magnetised by outlaw sensibility, hard lives lived at a slant, art made in conditions of ferment and unrest, though she rarely serves a platter that isn’t style-mag ready … She makes a pretty convincing case for a political dimension to Jeff Koons’s vacuities and mirrored surfaces, engages repeatedly with the Italian avant garde and writes best of all about an artist friend whose death undoes a spell of nihilism … It’s not just that Kushner is looking back on the distant city of youth; more that she’s the sole survivor of a wild crowd done down by prison, drugs, untimely death … What she remembers is a whole world, but does the act of immortalising it in language also drain it of its power,’neon, in pink, red, and warm white, bleeding into the fog’? She’s mining a rich seam of specificity, her writing charged by the dangers she ran up against. And then there’s the frank pleasure of her sentences, often shorn of definite articles or odd words, so they rev and bucket along … That New Journalism style, live hard and keep your eyes open, has long since given way to the millennial cult of the personal essay, with its performance of pain, its earnest display of wounds received and lessons learned. But Kushner brings it all flooding back. Even if I’m skeptical of its dazzle, I’m glad to taste something this sharp, this smart.”

–Olivia Laing ( The Guardian )

7. The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century by Amia Srinivasan (FSG)

12 Rave • 7 Positive • 5 Mixed • 1 Pan

“[A] quietly dazzling new essay collection … This is, needless to say, fraught terrain, and Srinivasan treads it with determination and skill … These essays are works of both criticism and imagination. Srinivasan refuses to resort to straw men; she will lay out even the most specious argument clearly and carefully, demonstrating its emotional power, even if her ultimate intention is to dismantle it … This, then, is a book that explicitly addresses intersectionality, even if Srinivasan is dissatisfied with the common—and reductive—understanding of the term … Srinivasan has written a compassionate book. She has also written a challenging one … Srinivasan proposes the kind of education enacted in this brilliant, rigorous book. She coaxes our imaginations out of the well-worn grooves of the existing order.”

–Jennifer Szalai ( The New York Times )

8. A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib (Random House)

13 Rave • 4 Positive Listen to an interview with Hanif Abdurraqib here

“[A] wide, deep, and discerning inquest into the Beauty of Blackness as enacted on stages and screens, in unanimity and discord, on public airwaves and in intimate spaces … has brought to pop criticism and cultural history not just a poet’s lyricism and imagery but also a scholar’s rigor, a novelist’s sense of character and place, and a punk-rocker’s impulse to dislodge conventional wisdom from its moorings until something shakes loose and is exposed to audiences too lethargic to think or even react differently … Abdurraqib cherishes this power to enlarge oneself within or beyond real or imagined restrictions … Abdurraqib reminds readers of the massive viewing audience’s shock and awe over seeing one of the world’s biggest pop icons appearing midfield at this least radical of American rituals … Something about the seemingly insatiable hunger Abdurraqib shows for cultural transaction, paradoxical mischief, and Beauty in Blackness tells me he’ll get to such matters soon enough.”

–Gene Seymour ( Bookforum )

9. On Animals by Susan Orlean (Avid Reader Press)

11 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed Listen to an interview with Susan Orlean here

“I very much enjoyed Orlean’s perspective in these original, perceptive, and clever essays showcasing the sometimes strange, sometimes sick, sometimes tender relationships between people and animals … whether Orlean is writing about one couple’s quest to find their lost dog, the lives of working donkeys of the Fez medina in Morocco, or a man who rescues lions (and happily allows even full grown males to gently chew his head), her pages are crammed with quirky characters, telling details, and flabbergasting facts … Readers will find these pages full of astonishments … Orlean excels as a reporter…Such thorough reporting made me long for updates on some of these stories … But even this criticism only testifies to the delight of each of the urbane and vivid stories in this collection. Even though Orlean claims the animals she writes about remain enigmas, she makes us care about their fates. Readers will continue to think about these dogs and donkeys, tigers and lions, chickens and pigeons long after we close the book’s covers. I hope most of them are still well.”

–Sy Montgomery ( The Boston Globe )

10. Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache from the American South  by Margaret Renkl (Milkweed Editions)

9 Rave • 5 Positive Read Margaret Renkl on finding ideas everywhere, here

“Renkl’s sense of joyful belonging to the South, a region too often dismissed on both coasts in crude stereotypes and bad jokes, co-exists with her intense desire for Southerners who face prejudice or poverty finally to be embraced and supported … Renkl at her most tender and most fierce … Renkl’s gift, just as it was in her first book Late Migrations , is to make fascinating for others what is closest to her heart … Any initial sense of emotional whiplash faded as as I proceeded across the six sections and realized that the book is largely organized around one concept, that of fair and loving treatment for all—regardless of race, class, sex, gender or species … What rises in me after reading her essays is Lewis’ famous urging to get in good trouble to make the world fairer and better. Many people in the South are doing just that—and through her beautiful writing, Renkl is among them.”

–Barbara J. King ( NPR )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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Longreads Best of 2020: Essays

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All through December, we’re featuring Longreads’ Best of 2020. This year, our editors picked and featured hundreds of beautifully written and poignant essays published on the web. Because of the wide range of writing across many topics and themes, it was a challenge to sift through them all over the past several weeks to compile a definitive Best of Essays list. As I shortlisted stories, I realized there could be many different versions of this list, but, in the end, these eight reads really spoke to me.

If you like these, you can  sign up to receive our weekly email every Friday .

Mississippi: A Poem, in Days (Kiese Makeba Laymon, Vanity Fair )

Kiese Makeba Laymon was on a book tour when the pandemic hit in the U.S. In this stunner of a piece that unfolds over 14 days, the author writes on fear, racism, death, and home amid a moment of awakening. We follow along on the journey, from event to event in Ohio and West Virginia, with Laymon’s observations and thoughts interspersed with daily COVID-19 death counts and the latest words or orders from Donald Trump and Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves. It’s a powerful meditation, one that will stop you in your tracks.

We are awakened, I want to believe. 75 miles from the armed confederate statue in Oxford, Emmett Till’s childish body was destroyed. 70 miles from that armed confederate statue, Fannie Lou Hamer was nearly beaten to death. 160 miles from that armed confederate statue, Medgar Evers was murdered as he enters his home. 80 miles from that armed confederate statue, Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis. It took way too much Black death to get here. I am wandering around the spiritual consequences of materially progressing at the expense of Black death. I want to be courageous. I wonder, though, when courage becomes contagious—when courage is credentialized, subsidized, and incentivized—if it is still courage at all. Today, as I prepare to push send, and I lather my hands in sanitizer, it feels a bit too much like cowardice. Maybe I’ll wait to send tomorrow. Maybe I won’t send at all. The Lafayette County Board of Supervisors, a group of white men, unanimously vote to keep the armed confederate monument in the middle of Oxford, the town where I live, teach, and write. Humiliation, agony, and death, are what I feel. It could all be so much worse, is what the worst of white folks want us to recite.

Molly (Blake Butler, The Volta )

December’s special issue of The Volta is dedicated to the late poet Molly Brodak, and Brodak’s husband, Blake Butler, writes an incredibly moving essay to remember and honor her. In “Molly,” he weaves an intimate portrait of his late wife — and the details, textures, and expanse of their relationship –with so much love and care. Grab a tissue before sitting down to read it.

Making her laugh made me feel alive, like I’d really accomplished something. She wanted to laugh, I think, despite a widening parcel in her telling her that laughter in a world like ours was for fools. When I think the sound of it now, it reminds me of a bird trapped in a ballroom, looking for anywhere to land.

But there was always something still there underneath that, shredding its pasture—parts of her so dark and displaced I cannot find them anywhere touching the rest of how she was. The story, like all stories, holds no true shape. And that’s exactly what it wants—the pain—it wants more blank to feed the pain with, to fill the space up. It wants us all.

Then, in her poem, “Horse and Cart,” one of the last she ever wrote: “I can’t even imagine a horse / anymore. / That we sat on their spines / and yanked their mouths around.” The gears of her mind, as she grew tired, wore down even these good times, seeking further ways to break them up, send her away.

I Cry for the Mountains: A Legacy Lost (Dave Daley, Chico Enterprise-Record )

California experienced another unprecedented wildfire season this year; a number of fire complexes burned throughout the state, including the massive North Complex Fire that started in August and burned in Northern California’s Plumas and Butte counties. Rancher Dave Daley offers a devastating account of the destruction of his family’s cattle range in Plumas National Forest, and a passionate plea to legislators and regulators to ultimately listen to the land and the locals when it comes to forest management. Daley originally posted this account on Facebook; his followers recommended that the Chico Enterprise-Record  reprint it for a wider audience.

I cry for the forest, the trees and streams, and the horrible deaths suffered by the wildlife and our cattle. The suffering was unimaginable. When you find groups of cows and their baby calves tumbled in a ravine trying to escape, burned almost beyond recognition or a fawn and small calf side by side as if hoping to protect one another, you try not to wretch. You only pray death was swift. Worse, in searing memory, cows with their hooves, udder and even legs burned off still alive who had to be euthanized. A doe lying in the ashes with three fawns, not all hers I bet. And you are glad they can stand and move, even with a limp, because you really cannot imagine any more death today.

For those of you on the right blaming the left and California, these are National Forest lands that are “managed” by the feds. They have failed miserably over the past 50 years. Smokey the Bear was the cruelest joke ever played on the western landscape, a decades long campaign to prevent forest fires has resulted in mega-fires of a scope we’ve never seen. Thanks, Smokey.

I get frustrated with experts and consultants who drive by and “know just what to do.” For 35 years I have attended conferences, given presentations and listened. What I have learned is solutions are local and specific. What happens in one watershed in Plumas or Butte County may be entirely different in the Lassen National Forest just next door. But experts of all kinds are glad to tell you how to do it. “Let’s prescribe graze, use virtual fences, change your timing, change your genetics.” Prescribe graze the forest and canyons? Yea. Right. They don’t know what they don’t know but they will take the honorarium anyway and have a great dinner on your dime. The locals and land rarely benefit.

How My Mother and I Became Chinese Propaganda (Jiayang Fa n , The New Yorker )

Jiayang Fan pens a masterful piece of personal history, on her mother and their relationship, identity, family, propaganda and social media, and chronic illness (her mother has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS) . Fan recounts her struggle to help her mother get hospital care during New York’s COVID-19 crisis, all while going viral and facing threats on social media, calling her a criminal and a traitor to China. She tells a complicated and very personal story, one of loyalty and love, with strength and eloquence.

My mother has always knelt at the altar of  mianzi , an aspiration of which A.L.S. makes a spectacular mockery. You may think it’s embarrassing to slur your speech and limp, but wait until you are being spoon-fed and pushed around in a wheelchair—all of which will seem trivial once you can no longer wash or wipe yourself. The progress of the disease is a forced march toward the vanishing point of  mianzi . When my mother was first given her diagnosis, she became obsessed with the idea of why—why her, why now, and, above all, why an illness that would subject her to the kind of public humiliation she feared more than death itself. When she could still operate her first-generation iPad, my mother gave me a contact list of everyone she was still in touch with in China, and told me that, except for her siblings, no one must know of her affliction. Such self-imposed isolation seemed like madness to me, but she preferred to cut friends out of her life rather than admit to the indignity of her compromised state. Her body’s insurrection, my mother believes, is her punishment for her prideful strivings in America.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I had read that a virus is neither dead nor alive, and replicates only in the shelter of a host organism. I began to think of “Jiayang Fan” as viral not in a social-media sense but in a biological one; the calamitous state of the world and certain random mutations in the story had made it unexpectedly contagious. My original posts had served their purpose; now they were serving the purposes of others. I had unwittingly bred a potent piece of propaganda.

The Promise That Tested My Parents Until the End (Christopher Solomon, GQ )

Don’t you ever put me in one of those places,  she said. Don’t put  me  in one of those places,  my father replied.

Christopher Solomon’s parents made a pledge to one another. But what did that actually look like over time, especially when his father became sick? What does unconditional love and devotion look like in our own lives? Solomon writes an honest and heartbreaking essay on love, aging, and marriage — in sickness and in health.

In time what was imperceptible in him became noticeable, and then what was noticeable became something worse. The landscape of my father changed, the coastline eroded. There was less of him, until the old map of my father no longer fit the man before us. It has been 20 years now since he was diagnosed, and sometimes it is hard to remember a time that he was not sick. His speech became a gargle of consonants. The dementia took most of his mind. His body curled in on itself—shrinking, reducing, as if he were becoming an infant again. Despite this, for years he still played the piano, every day, and nearly as well as ever—the mysteryland of the brain permitting this freedom even as body, and mind, crumbled around him. My mother would sing along from the kitchen, as she always had. And then one day, after I arrive home, my mother sounds more concerned than usual.  He has stopped playing the piano,  she says. This seems to worry her more than anything else.

Finally, exhausted, she relents. She drives to visit a nearby nursing home. Afterward she cries in the parking lot. She cries for what she sees there. She cries at the prospect of breaking the Promise. She cries because even though almost nothing remains of her husband—even though he is the cause of her sleepless nights and her tendinitis and her bruises and her anger—in 55 years she rarely has been apart from him. She loves even the scrap of him that remains. He is half of the story they share, of the red VW Beetle and the sunstruck Italian patios and the singalongs and the three towheaded children. As long as he is here, their story, however unlikely, is not yet over. She cries because the end of him is the end of a possibility. And I think, not for the first time, how little I still know about love.

Kamala Harris, Mass Incarceration and Me (Reginald Dwayne Betts, The New York Times Magazine )

“The prosecutor’s job, unlike the defense attorney’s or judge’s, is to do justice. What does that mean when you are asked by some to dole out retribution measured in years served, but blamed by others for the damage incarceration can do?” In this nuanced reported essay about mass incarceration in the U.S., Reginald Dwayne Betts reveals “our contradictory impulses” around crime, punishment, and the justice system. And he knows these impulses well, as both a felon and a son to a woman who was raped by a Black man.

But I know that on the other end of our prison sentences was always someone weeping. During the middle of Harris’s presidential campaign, a friend referred me to a woman with a story about Senator Harris that she felt I needed to hear. Years ago, this woman’s sister had been missing for days, and the police had done little. Happenstance gave this woman an audience with then-Attorney General Harris. A coordinated multicity search followed. The sister had been murdered; her body was found in a ravine. The woman told me that “Kamala understands the politics of victimization as well as anyone who has been in the system, which is that this kind of case — a 50-year-old Black woman gone missing or found dead — ordinarily does not get any resources put toward it.” They caught the man who murdered her sister, and he was sentenced to 131 years. I think about the man who assaulted my mother, a serial rapist, because his case makes me struggle with questions of violence and vengeance and justice. And I stop thinking about it. I am inconsistent. I want my friends out, but I know there is no one who can convince me that this man shouldn’t spend the rest of his life in prison.

Safe at Home in Los Angeles (Lynell George, High Country News )

Lynell George’s beautiful read exemplifies what I love about writing on place and home. A native of Los Angeles, George builds and shapes a complex L.A. in her piece: a “city of contradictions,” an elusive, ever-shifting place “built on either impermanence or illusion.” It’s a sensory and richly textured portrait of a vast place, looking at Los Angeles through a sort of kaleidoscope lens of gentrification, nature, and the pandemic lockdown.

Los Angeles has long been a contested domain — both as territory (from the Indigenous Tongva onward) and as emblem. Boosters, speculators and swindlers have had their way not just with the land but with the very image of Los Angeles. The city grew, like an opportunistic vine. It couldn’t just  be . It had to be bigger than life, better than perfect. Even within my lifetime, popular culture has conjured a vision of Los Angeles that is sleight-of-hand, a trick of light, brutally at odds with the lived experience. Los Angeles, by its sprawling nature, absolutely resists oversimplification. This, despite its frustrations, irritants and absurdities, is precisely why I remain here.

Those stories of place, the Los Angeles of my childhood and adolescence and young adulthood — the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s — couldn’t be told until we began to tell them. Until we steadied and raised our voices. Until we made our way through gatekeepers, and most significantly until we were of age and of mind to turn our attention to a shifting definition of the West (or  El Norte ), one that included stories of migration and immigration, of protest, of underemployment, of struggle, and of love and resilience despite disappointment, and in the ways in which we tend to the physical environment, to conserve against drought or be mindful of energy use and emissions. We must tend to the region’s various topographies in narrative. It’s imperative. Or they will be lost. As a chronicler, my responsibility is to try and tell an honest story. True to its roots. Even now, even in this quiet moment in the city, we must remember its cacophony, its music.

My Mustache, My Self (Wesley Morris, The New York Times Magazine )

This essay from Wesley Morris on growing a mustache during the pandemic is about so much more than quarantine-grown facial hair — it’s a brilliant and vulnerable piece on masculinity and race, one in which Morris reflects on becoming himself and considers and celebrates his Blackness.

The mustache had certainly conjoined me to a past I was flattered to be associated with, however superficially. But there were implications. During the later stages of the movement, a mustached man opened himself up to charges of white appeasement and Uncle Tom-ism. Not because of the mustache, obviously, but because of the approach of the sort of person who would choose to wear one. Such a person might not have been considered radical enough, down enough, Black enough. The civil rights mustache was strategically tolerant. It didn’t advocate burning anything down. It ran for office — and sometimes it won. It was establishmentarian, compromising and eventually, come the infernos at the close of the 1960s, it fell out of fashion, in part because it felt out of step with the urgency of the moment.

The Black-power salute is not a casual gesture. It’s weaponry. You aim that arm and fire. I aimed mine in solidarity — with white people instead of at a system they personify. And that didn’t feel quite right. But how would I know? I had never done a Black-power salute. It always seemed like more Blackness than I’ve needed, maybe more than I had. I’m not Black-power Black. I’ve always been milder, more apprehensive than that. I was practically born with a mustache.

Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Cheri has been an editor at Longreads since 2014. She's currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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Example of a Great Essay | Explanations, Tips & Tricks

Published on February 9, 2015 by Shane Bryson . Revised on July 23, 2023 by Shona McCombes.

This example guides you through the structure of an essay. It shows how to build an effective introduction , focused paragraphs , clear transitions between ideas, and a strong conclusion .

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Other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about writing an essay, an appeal to the senses: the development of the braille system in nineteenth-century france.

The invention of Braille was a major turning point in the history of disability. The writing system of raised dots used by visually impaired people was developed by Louis Braille in nineteenth-century France. In a society that did not value disabled people in general, blindness was particularly stigmatized, and lack of access to reading and writing was a significant barrier to social participation. The idea of tactile reading was not entirely new, but existing methods based on sighted systems were difficult to learn and use. As the first writing system designed for blind people’s needs, Braille was a groundbreaking new accessibility tool. It not only provided practical benefits, but also helped change the cultural status of blindness. This essay begins by discussing the situation of blind people in nineteenth-century Europe. It then describes the invention of Braille and the gradual process of its acceptance within blind education. Subsequently, it explores the wide-ranging effects of this invention on blind people’s social and cultural lives.

Lack of access to reading and writing put blind people at a serious disadvantage in nineteenth-century society. Text was one of the primary methods through which people engaged with culture, communicated with others, and accessed information; without a well-developed reading system that did not rely on sight, blind people were excluded from social participation (Weygand, 2009). While disabled people in general suffered from discrimination, blindness was widely viewed as the worst disability, and it was commonly believed that blind people were incapable of pursuing a profession or improving themselves through culture (Weygand, 2009). This demonstrates the importance of reading and writing to social status at the time: without access to text, it was considered impossible to fully participate in society. Blind people were excluded from the sighted world, but also entirely dependent on sighted people for information and education.

In France, debates about how to deal with disability led to the adoption of different strategies over time. While people with temporary difficulties were able to access public welfare, the most common response to people with long-term disabilities, such as hearing or vision loss, was to group them together in institutions (Tombs, 1996). At first, a joint institute for the blind and deaf was created, and although the partnership was motivated more by financial considerations than by the well-being of the residents, the institute aimed to help people develop skills valuable to society (Weygand, 2009). Eventually blind institutions were separated from deaf institutions, and the focus shifted towards education of the blind, as was the case for the Royal Institute for Blind Youth, which Louis Braille attended (Jimenez et al, 2009). The growing acknowledgement of the uniqueness of different disabilities led to more targeted education strategies, fostering an environment in which the benefits of a specifically blind education could be more widely recognized.

Several different systems of tactile reading can be seen as forerunners to the method Louis Braille developed, but these systems were all developed based on the sighted system. The Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris taught the students to read embossed roman letters, a method created by the school’s founder, Valentin Hauy (Jimenez et al., 2009). Reading this way proved to be a rather arduous task, as the letters were difficult to distinguish by touch. The embossed letter method was based on the reading system of sighted people, with minimal adaptation for those with vision loss. As a result, this method did not gain significant success among blind students.

Louis Braille was bound to be influenced by his school’s founder, but the most influential pre-Braille tactile reading system was Charles Barbier’s night writing. A soldier in Napoleon’s army, Barbier developed a system in 1819 that used 12 dots with a five line musical staff (Kersten, 1997). His intention was to develop a system that would allow the military to communicate at night without the need for light (Herron, 2009). The code developed by Barbier was phonetic (Jimenez et al., 2009); in other words, the code was designed for sighted people and was based on the sounds of words, not on an actual alphabet. Barbier discovered that variants of raised dots within a square were the easiest method of reading by touch (Jimenez et al., 2009). This system proved effective for the transmission of short messages between military personnel, but the symbols were too large for the fingertip, greatly reducing the speed at which a message could be read (Herron, 2009). For this reason, it was unsuitable for daily use and was not widely adopted in the blind community.

Nevertheless, Barbier’s military dot system was more efficient than Hauy’s embossed letters, and it provided the framework within which Louis Braille developed his method. Barbier’s system, with its dashes and dots, could form over 4000 combinations (Jimenez et al., 2009). Compared to the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, this was an absurdly high number. Braille kept the raised dot form, but developed a more manageable system that would reflect the sighted alphabet. He replaced Barbier’s dashes and dots with just six dots in a rectangular configuration (Jimenez et al., 2009). The result was that the blind population in France had a tactile reading system using dots (like Barbier’s) that was based on the structure of the sighted alphabet (like Hauy’s); crucially, this system was the first developed specifically for the purposes of the blind.

While the Braille system gained immediate popularity with the blind students at the Institute in Paris, it had to gain acceptance among the sighted before its adoption throughout France. This support was necessary because sighted teachers and leaders had ultimate control over the propagation of Braille resources. Many of the teachers at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth resisted learning Braille’s system because they found the tactile method of reading difficult to learn (Bullock & Galst, 2009). This resistance was symptomatic of the prevalent attitude that the blind population had to adapt to the sighted world rather than develop their own tools and methods. Over time, however, with the increasing impetus to make social contribution possible for all, teachers began to appreciate the usefulness of Braille’s system (Bullock & Galst, 2009), realizing that access to reading could help improve the productivity and integration of people with vision loss. It took approximately 30 years, but the French government eventually approved the Braille system, and it was established throughout the country (Bullock & Galst, 2009).

Although Blind people remained marginalized throughout the nineteenth century, the Braille system granted them growing opportunities for social participation. Most obviously, Braille allowed people with vision loss to read the same alphabet used by sighted people (Bullock & Galst, 2009), allowing them to participate in certain cultural experiences previously unavailable to them. Written works, such as books and poetry, had previously been inaccessible to the blind population without the aid of a reader, limiting their autonomy. As books began to be distributed in Braille, this barrier was reduced, enabling people with vision loss to access information autonomously. The closing of the gap between the abilities of blind and the sighted contributed to a gradual shift in blind people’s status, lessening the cultural perception of the blind as essentially different and facilitating greater social integration.

The Braille system also had important cultural effects beyond the sphere of written culture. Its invention later led to the development of a music notation system for the blind, although Louis Braille did not develop this system himself (Jimenez, et al., 2009). This development helped remove a cultural obstacle that had been introduced by the popularization of written musical notation in the early 1500s. While music had previously been an arena in which the blind could participate on equal footing, the transition from memory-based performance to notation-based performance meant that blind musicians were no longer able to compete with sighted musicians (Kersten, 1997). As a result, a tactile musical notation system became necessary for professional equality between blind and sighted musicians (Kersten, 1997).

Braille paved the way for dramatic cultural changes in the way blind people were treated and the opportunities available to them. Louis Braille’s innovation was to reimagine existing reading systems from a blind perspective, and the success of this invention required sighted teachers to adapt to their students’ reality instead of the other way around. In this sense, Braille helped drive broader social changes in the status of blindness. New accessibility tools provide practical advantages to those who need them, but they can also change the perspectives and attitudes of those who do not.

Bullock, J. D., & Galst, J. M. (2009). The Story of Louis Braille. Archives of Ophthalmology , 127(11), 1532. https://​doi.org/10.1001/​archophthalmol.2009.286.

Herron, M. (2009, May 6). Blind visionary. Retrieved from https://​eandt.theiet.org/​content/​articles/2009/05/​blind-visionary/.

Jiménez, J., Olea, J., Torres, J., Alonso, I., Harder, D., & Fischer, K. (2009). Biography of Louis Braille and Invention of the Braille Alphabet. Survey of Ophthalmology , 54(1), 142–149. https://​doi.org/10.1016/​j.survophthal.2008.10.006.

Kersten, F.G. (1997). The history and development of Braille music methodology. The Bulletin of Historical Research in Music Education , 18(2). Retrieved from https://​www.jstor.org/​stable/40214926.

Mellor, C.M. (2006). Louis Braille: A touch of genius . Boston: National Braille Press.

Tombs, R. (1996). France: 1814-1914 . London: Pearson Education Ltd.

Weygand, Z. (2009). The blind in French society from the Middle Ages to the century of Louis Braille . Stanford: Stanford University Press.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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An essay is a focused piece of writing that explains, argues, describes, or narrates.

In high school, you may have to write many different types of essays to develop your writing skills.

Academic essays at college level are usually argumentative : you develop a clear thesis about your topic and make a case for your position using evidence, analysis and interpretation.

The structure of an essay is divided into an introduction that presents your topic and thesis statement , a body containing your in-depth analysis and arguments, and a conclusion wrapping up your ideas.

The structure of the body is flexible, but you should always spend some time thinking about how you can organize your essay to best serve your ideas.

Your essay introduction should include three main things, in this order:

• An opening hook to catch the reader’s attention.
• Relevant background information that the reader needs to know.
• A thesis statement that presents your main point or argument.

The length of each part depends on the length and complexity of your essay .

A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . Everything else you write should relate to this key idea.

A topic sentence is a sentence that expresses the main point of a paragraph . Everything else in the paragraph should relate to the topic sentence.

At college level, you must properly cite your sources in all essays , research papers , and other academic texts (except exams and in-class exercises).

Add a citation whenever you quote , paraphrase , or summarize information or ideas from a source. You should also give full source details in a bibliography or reference list at the end of your text.

The exact format of your citations depends on which citation style you are instructed to use. The most common styles are APA , MLA , and Chicago .

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

Bryson, S. (2023, July 23). Example of a Great Essay | Explanations, Tips & Tricks. Scribbr. Retrieved September 5, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/example-essay-structure/

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Shane finished his master's degree in English literature in 2013 and has been working as a writing tutor and editor since 2009. He began proofreading and editing essays with Scribbr in early summer, 2014.

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Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates | 4.94

Barack Obama The president also released a list of his summer favorites back in 2015: All That Is, James Salter The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates Washington: A Life, Ron Chernow All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr (Source)

Jack Dorsey Q: What are the books that had a major influence on you? Or simply the ones you like the most. : Tao te Ching, score takes care of itself, between the world and me, the four agreements, the old man and the sea...I love reading! (Source)

Doug McMillon Here are some of my favorite reads from 2017. Lots of friends and colleagues send me book suggestions and it's impossible to squeeze them all in. I continue to be super curious about how digital and tech are enabling people to transform our lives but I try to read a good mix of books that apply to a variety of areas and stretch my thinking more broadly. (Source)

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Joan Didion | 4.94

Peter Hessler I like Didion for her writing style and her control over her material, but also for the way in which she captures a historical moment. (Source)

Liz Lambert I love [this book] so much. (Source)

We Should All Be Feminists

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | 4.92

Bad Feminist

Roxane Gay | 4.88

Irina Nica It’s hard to pick an all-time favorite because, as time goes by and I grow older, my reading list becomes more “mature” and I find myself interested in new things. I probably have a personal favorite book for each stage of my life. Right now I’m absolutely blown away by everything Roxane Gay wrote, especially Bad Feminist. (Source)

Trick Mirror

Reflections on Self-Delusion

Jia Tolentino | 4.86

Lydia Polgreen This book is amazing and you should read it. https://t.co/pcbmYUR4QP (Source)

Maryanne Hobbs ⁦@jiatolentino⁩ hello Jia :) finding your perspectives in the new book fascinating and so resonant.. thank you 🌹 m/a..x https://t.co/BoNzB1BuDf (Source)

Yashar Ali . @jiatolentino’s fabulous book is one of President Obama’s favorite books of 2019 https://t.co/QHzZsHl2rF (Source)

Consider the Lobster

And Other Essays

David Foster Wallace | 4.85

A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf | 4.75

Dress Your Family in Corduroy & Denim

David Sedaris | 4.73

Adam Kay @penceyprepmemes How about David Sedaris, for starters - "Dress your family in corduroy and denim" is an amazing book. (Source)

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The Fire Next Time

James Baldwin | 4.69

Barack Obama Fact or fiction, the president knows that reading keeps the mind sharp. He also delved into these non-fiction reads: Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Evan Osnos Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman Moral Man And Immoral Society, Reinhold Niebuhr A Kind And Just Parent, William Ayers The Post-American World, Fareed Zakaria Lessons in Disaster, Gordon Goldstein Sapiens: A Brief History of... (Source)

When You Are Engulfed in Flames

David Sedaris | 4.67

David Sedaris | 4.63

David Blaine It’s hilarious. (Source)

The White Album

Joan Didion | 4.62

Dan Richards I feel Joan Didion is the patron saint of a maelstrom of culture and environment of a particular time. She is the great American road-trip writer, to my mind. She has that great widescreen filmic quality to her work. (Source)

Steven Amsterdam With her gaze on California of the late 60s and early 70s, Didion gives us the Black Panthers, Janis Joplin, Nancy Reagan, and the Manson follower Linda Kasabian. (Source)

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

Essays and Arguments

David Foster Wallace | 4.61

Tressie McMillan Cottom | 4.60

Melissa Moore The best book I read this year was Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom. I read it twice and both times found it challenging and revelatory. (Source)

David Sedaris and Hachette Audi | 4.60

Sister Outsider

Essays and Speeches

Audre Lorde, Cheryl Clarke | 4.60

Bianca Belair For #BHM  I will be sharing some of my favorite books by Black Authors 26th Book: Sister Outsider By: Audre Lorde My first time reading anything by Audre Lorde. I am now really looking forward to reading more of her poems/writings. What she writes is important &amp; timeless. https://t.co/dUDMcaAAbx (Source)

Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls

David Sedaris | 4.58

Austin Kleon I read this one, then I read his collected diaries, Theft By Finding, and then I read the visual compendium, which might have even been the most interesting of the three books, but I’m listing this one because it’s hilarious, although with the interstitial fiction bits, it’s sort of like one of those classic 90s hip-hop albums where you skip the “skit” tracks. (Source)

Notes from a Loud Woman

Lindy West | 4.56

Matt Mcgorry "Shrill: Notes From a Loud Woman" by Lindy West @TheLindyWest # Lovvvvveeedddd, loved, loved, loved this book!!!  West is a truly remarkable writer and her stories are beautifully poignant while dosed with her… https://t.co/nzJtXtOGTn (Source)

Shannon Coulter @JennLHaglund @tomi_adeyemi I love that feeling! Just finished the audiobook version of Shrill by Lindy West after _years_ of meaning to read it and that's the exact feeling it gave me. Give me your book recommendations! (Source)

The Collected Schizophrenias

Esmé Weijun Wang | 4.52

Tiny Beautiful Things

Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Cheryl Strayed | 4.49

Ryan Holiday It was wonderful to read these two provocative books of essays by two incredibly wise and compassionate women. Cheryl Strayed, also the author of Wild, was the anonymous columnist behind the online column, Dear Sugar and boy, are we better off for it. This is not a random smattering of advice. This book contains some of the most cogent insights on life, pain, loss, love, success, youth that I... (Source)

James Altucher Cheryl had an advice column called “Dear Sugar”. I was reading the column long before Oprah recommended “Wild” by Cheryl and then Wild became a movie and “Tiny Beautiful Things” (the collection of her advice column) became a book. She is so wise and compassionate. A modern saint. I used to do Q&A sessions on Twitter. I’d read her book beforehand to get inspiration about what true advice is. (Source)

We Were Eight Years in Power

An American Tragedy

Ta-Nehisi Coates | 4.47

The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

Albert Camu | 4.47

David Heinemeier Hansson Camus’ philosophical exposition of absurdity, suicide in the face of meaninglessness, and other cherry topics that continue on from his fictional work in novels like The Stranger. It’s surprisingly readable, unlike many other mid 20th century philosophers, yet no less deep or pointy. It’s a great follow-up, as an original text, to that book The Age of Absurdity, I recommended last year. Still... (Source)

Kenan Malik The Myth of Sisyphus is a small work, but Camus’s meditation on faith and fate has personally been hugely important in developing my ideas. Writing in the embers of World War II, Camus confronts in The Myth of Sisyphus both the tragedy of recent history and what he sees as the absurdity of the human condition. There is, he observes, a chasm between the human need for meaning and what he calls... (Source)

The Penguin Essays Of George Orwell

George Orwell, Bernard Crick | 4.46

Peter Kellner George Orwell was not only an extraordinary writer but he also hated any form of cant. Some of his most widely read works such as 1984 and Animal Farm are an assault on the nastier, narrow-minded, dictatorial tendencies of the left, although Orwell was himself on the left. (Source)

The Opposite of Loneliness

Essays and Stories

Marina Keegan, Anne Fadiman | 4.46

Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | 4.45

The Tipping Point

How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Malcolm Gladwell | 4.45

Kevin Rose Bunch of really good information in here on how to make ideas go viral. This could be good to apply to any kind of products or ideas you may have. Definitely, check out The Tipping Point, which is one of my favorites. (Source)

Seth Godin Malcolm Gladwell's breakthrough insight was to focus on the micro-relationships between individuals, which helped organizations realize that it's not about the big ads and the huge charity balls... it's about setting the stage for the buzz to start. (Source)

Andy Stern I think that when we talk about making change, it is much more about macro change, like in policy. This book reminds you that at times when you're building big movements, or trying to elect significant decision-makers in politics, sometimes it's the little things that make a difference. Ever since the book was written, we've become very used to the idea of things going viral unexpectedly and then... (Source)

Selected Essays

Mary Oliver | 4.44

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.

Samantha Irby | 4.44

Complete Essays

Michel de Montaigne, Charles Cotton | 4.42

Ryan Holiday There is plenty to study and see simply by looking inwards — maybe even an alarming amount. (Source)

Alain de Botton I’ve given quite a lot of copies of [this book] to people down the years. (Source)

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)

Mindy Kaling | 4.42

Angela Kinsey .@mindykaling I am rereading your book and cracking up. I appreciate your chapter on The Office so much more now. But all of it is fantastic. Thanks for starting my day with laughter. You know I loves ya. ❤️ https://t.co/EB99xnyt0p (Source)

Yashar Ali Reminds me of one of my favorite lines from @mindykaling's book (even though I'm an early riser): “There is no sunrise so beautiful that it is worth waking me up to see it.” https://t.co/pS56bmyYjS (Source)

Not That Bad

Dispatches from Rape Culture

Roxane Gay, Brandon Taylor, et al | 4.40

Henry David Thoreau | 4.40

Laura Dassow Walls The book that we love as Walden began in the journal entries that he wrote starting with his first day at the pond. (Source)

Roman Krznaric In 1845 the American naturalist went out to live in the woods of Western Massachusetts. Thoreau was one of the great masters of the art of simple living. (Source)

John Kaag There’s this idea that philosophy can blend into memoir and that, ideally, philosophy, at its best, is to help us through the business of living with people, within communities. This is a point that Thoreau’s Walden gave to me, as a writer, and why I consider it so valuable for today. (Source)

Confessions of a Common Reader

Anne Fadiman | 4.40

I Feel Bad About My Neck

And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

Nora Ephron | 4.39

Holidays on Ice

David Sedaris | 4.37

An American Lyric

Claudia Rankine | 4.36

Cheryl Strayed A really important book for us to be reading right now. (Source)

Jeremy Noel-Tod Obviously, it’s been admired and acclaimed, but I do feel the general reception of it has underplayed its artfulness. Its technical subtlety and overall arrangement has been neglected, because it has been classified as a kind of documentary work. (Source)

Christopher Hitchens | 4.36

Le Grove @billysubway Hitchens book under your arm. I’m reading Arguably. When he’s at his best, he is a savage. Unbelievable prose. (Source)

Notes of a Native Son

James Baldwin | 4.35

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

Oliver Sacks | 4.34

Suzanne O'Sullivan I didn’t choose neurology because of it but the way Oliver Sacks writes about neurology is very compelling. (Source)

Tanya Byron This is a seminal book that anyone who wants to work in mental health should read. It is a charming and gentle and also an honest exposé of what can happen to us when our mental health is compromised for whatever reason. (Source)

Bradley Voytek I can’t imagine one day waking up and not knowing who my wife is, or seeing my wife and thinking that she was replaced by some sort of clone or robot. But that could happen to any of us. (Source)

The Empathy Exams

Leslie Jamison | 4.33

This is the Story of a Happy Marriage

Ann Patchett | 4.31

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

A Low Culture Manifesto

Chuck Klosterman | 4.30

Karen Pfaff Manganillo Never have I read a book that I said “this is so perfect, amazing, hilarious, he’s thinking what I’m thinking (in a much more thought out and cool way)”. (Source)

Bird By Bird

Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Anne Lamott | 4.29

Susan Cain I love [this book]. Such a good book. (Source)

Timothy Ferriss Bird by Bird is one of my absolute favorite books, and I gift it to everybody, which I should probably also give to startup founders, quite frankly. A lot of the lessons are the same. But you can get to your destination, even though you can only see 20 feet in front of you. (Source)

Ryan Holiday It was wonderful to read these two provocative books of essays by two incredibly wise and compassionate women. [...] Anne Lamott’s book is ostensibly about the art of writing, but really it too is about life and how to tackle the problems, temptations and opportunities life throws at us. Both will make you think and both made me a better person this year. (Source)

Zadie Smith | 4.29

Barack Obama As 2018 draws to a close, I’m continuing a favorite tradition of mine and sharing my year-end lists. It gives me a moment to pause and reflect on the year through the books I found most thought-provoking, inspiring, or just plain loved. It also gives me a chance to highlight talented authors – some who are household names and others who you may not have heard of before. Here’s my best of 2018... (Source)

What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

Malcolm Gladwell | 4.28

Sam Freedman @mrianleslie (Also I agree What the Dog Saw is his best book). (Source)

The Witches Are Coming

Lindy West | 4.27

Against Interpretation and Other Essays

Susan Sontag | 4.25

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

Alexander Chee | 4.25

Eula Biss Alex Chee explores the realm of the real with extraordinarily beautiful essays. Being real here is an ambition, a haunting, an impossibility, and an illusion. What passes for real, his essays suggest, becomes real, just as life becomes art and art, pursued this fully, becomes a life. (Source)

Changing My Mind

Occasional Essays

Zadie Smith | 4.25

Barrel Fever

David Sedaris | 4.24

Chelsea Handler [The author] is fucking hilarious and there's nothing I prefer to do more than laugh. If this book doesn't make you laugh, I'll refund you the money. (Source)

The Fire This Time

A New Generation Speaks About Race

Jesmyn Ward | 4.24

Why Not Me?

Mindy Kaling | 4.24

The View from the Cheap Seats

Selected Nonfiction

Neil Gaiman | 4.24

I Was Told There'd Be Cake

Sloane Crosley | 4.24

The Intelligent Investor

The Classic Text on Value Investing

Benjamin Graham | 4.23

Warren Buffett To invest successfully over a lifetime does not require a stratospheric IQ, unusual business insights, or inside information. What's needed is a sound intellectual framework for making decisions and the ability to keep emotions from corroding that framework. This book precisely and clearly prescribes the proper framework. You must provide the emotional discipline. (Source)

Kevin Rose The foundation for investing. A lot of people have used this as their guide to getting into investment, basic strategies. Actually Warren Buffett cites this as the book that got him into investing and he says that principles he learned here helped him to become a great investor. Highly recommend this book. It’s a great way understand what’s going on and how to evaluate different companies out... (Source)

John Kay The idea is that you look at the underlying value of the company’s activities instead of relying on market gossip. (Source)

Tell Me How It Ends

An Essay in Forty Questions

Valeria Luiselli | 4.23

Tina Fey | 4.22

Sheryl Sandberg I absolutely loved Tina Fey's "Bossypants" and didn't want it to end. It's hilarious as well as important. Not only was I laughing on every page, but I was nodding along, highlighting and dog-earing like crazy. [...] It is so, so good. As a young girl, I was labeled bossy, too, so as a former - O.K., current - bossypants, I am grateful to Tina for being outspoken, unapologetic and hysterically... (Source)

They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

Hanif Abdurraqib, Dr. Eve L. Ewing | 4.22

Saadia Muzaffar Man, this is such an amazing book of essays. Meditations on music and musicians and their moments and meaning-making. @NifMuhammad's mindworks are a gift. Go find it. (thank you @asad_ch!) https://t.co/htSueYYBUT (Source)

This Is Water

Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

David Foster Wallace | 4.21

John Jeremiah Sullivan | 4.21

Greil Marcus This is a new book by a writer in his mid-thirties, about all kinds of things. A lot of it is about the South, some of it is autobiographical, there is a long and quite wonderful piece about going to a Christian music camp. (Source)

The Mother of All Questions

Rebecca Solnit | 4.20

The Partly Cloudy Patriot

Sarah Vowell, Katherine Streeter | 4.20

Essays of E.B. White

E. B. White | 4.19

Adam Gopnik White, for me, is the great maker of the New Yorker style. Though it seems self-serving for me to say it, I think that style was the next step in the creation of the essay tone. One of the things White does is use a lot of the habits of the American newspaper in his essays. He is a genuinely simple, spare, understated writer. In the presence of White, even writers as inspired as Woolf and... (Source)

A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Rebecca Solnit | 4.19

A Man Without a Country

Kurt Vonnegut | 4.18

No Time to Spare

Thinking About What Matters

Ursula K. Le Guin, Karen Joy Fowler | 4.17

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Annie Dillard | 4.16

Laura Dassow Walls She’s enacting Thoreau, but in a 20th-century context: she takes on quantum physics, the latest research on DNA and the nature of life. (Source)

Sara Maitland This book, which won the Pulitzer literature prize when it was released, is the most beautiful book about the wild. (Source)

Maggie Nelson | 4.14

Furiously Happy

A Funny Book About Horrible Things

Jenny Lawson | 4.13

Women & Power

A Manifesto

Mary Beard | 4.13

Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

Timothy Snyder | 4.12

George Saunders Please read this book. So smart, so timely. (Source)

Tom Holland "There isn’t a page of this magnificent book that does not contain some fascinating detail and the narrative is held together with a novelist’s eye for character and theme." #Dominion https://t.co/FESSNxVDLC (Source)

Maya Wiley Prof. Tim Snyder, author of “In Tyranny” reminded us in that important little book that we must protect our institutions. #DOJ is one of our most important in gov’t for the rule of law. This is our collective house &amp; #Barr should be evicted. https://t.co/PPxM9IMQUm (Source)

Small Wonder

Barbara Kingsolver | 4.11

The Source of Self-Regard

Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

Toni Morrison | 4.11

Hyperbole and a Half

Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened

Allie Brosh | 4.11

Bill Gates While she self-deprecatingly depicts herself in words and art as an odd outsider, we can all relate to her struggles. Rather than laughing at her, you laugh with her. It is no hyperbole to say I love her approach -- looking, listening, and describing with the observational skills of a scientist, the creativity of an artist, and the wit of a comedian. (Source)

Samantha Irby | 4.10

Both Flesh and Not

David Foster Wallace | 4.10

David Papineau People can learn to do amazing things with their bodies, and people start honing and developing these skills as an end in itself, a very natural thing for humans to do. (Source)

So Sad Today

Personal Essays

Melissa Broder | 4.10

Hope in the Dark

Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

Rebecca Solnit | 4.09

Prem Panicker @sanjayen This is from an essay Solnit wrote to introduce the updated version of her book Hope In The Dark. Anything Solnit is brilliant; at times like these, she is the North Star. (Source)

The Faraway Nearby

How to Be Alone

Jonathan Franzen | 4.08

Regarding the Pain of Others

Susan Sontag | 4.08

The Essays of Warren Buffett

Lessons for Corporate America, Fifth Edition

Lawrence A. Cunningham and Warren E. Buffett | 4.08

One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter

Scaachi Koul | 4.07

Amy Poehler | 4.06

The Souls of Black Folk

W.E.B. Du Bois | 4.05

Barack Obama According to the president’s Facebook page and a 2008 interview with the New York Times, these titles are among his most influential forever favorites: Moby Dick, Herman Melville Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson Song Of Solomon, Toni Morrison Parting The Waters, Taylor Branch Gilead, Marylinne Robinson Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton Souls of Black... (Source)

In Praise of Shadows

Jun'ichiro Tanizaki | 4.05

Kyle Chayka Tanizaki is mourning what has been paved over, which is the old Japanese aesthetic of darkness, of softness, of appreciating the imperfect—rather than the cold, glossy surfaces of industrialized modernity that the West had brought to Japan at that moment. For me, that’s really valuable, because it does preserve a different way of looking at the world. (Source)

Ways of Seeing

John Berger | 4.04

Robert Jones He’s a Marxist and says that the role of publicity or branding is to make people marginally dissatisfied with their current way of life. (Source)

David McCammon Ways of Seeing goes beyond photography and will continue to develop your language around images. (Source)

John Harrison (Eton College) You have to understand the Marxist interpretation of art; it is absolutely fundamental to the way that art history departments now study the material. Then you have to critique it, because we’ve moved on from the 1970s and the collapse of Marxism in most of the world shows—amongst other things—that the model was flawed. But it’s still a very good book to read, for a teenager especially. (Source)

Tackling the Texas Essays

Efficient Preparation for the Texas Bar Exam

Catherine Martin Christopher | 4.04

The Book of Delights

Ross Gay | 4.04

Mere Christianity

C. S. Lewis | 4.04

Anoop Anthony "Mere Christianity" is first and foremost a rational book — it is in many ways the opposite of a traditional religious tome. Lewis, who was once an atheist, has been on both sides of the table, and he approaches the notion of God with accessible, clear thinking. The book reveals that experiencing God doesn't have to be a mystical exercise; God can be a concrete and logical conclusion. Lewis was... (Source)

I Remember Nothing

and Other Reflections

Nora Ephron | 4.04

On Photography

Susan Sontag | 4.03

Susan Bordo Sontag was the first to make the claim, which at the time was very controversial, that photography is misleading and seductive because it looks like reality but is in fact highly selective. (Source)

Notes from No Man's Land

American Essays

Eula Biss | 4.03

The Doors of Perception

Heaven and Hell (Thinking Classics)

Aldous Huxley, Robbie McCallum | 4.03

Michelle Rodriguez Aldous Huxley on Technodictators https://t.co/RDyX70lnZz via @YouTube ‘Doors of Perception’ is a great book entry level to hallucinogenics (Source)

Auston Bunsen I also really loved “The doors of perception” by Aldous Huxley. (Source)

Dr. Andrew Weil Came first [in terms of my interests]. (Source)

The Geek Feminist Revolution

Kameron Hurley | 4.02

Wow, No Thank You.

Samantha Irby | 4.01

A Modest Proposal

Jonathan Swift | 4.01

At Large and at Small

Familiar Essays

Anne Fadiman | 4.00

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The best essay collections for proving how amazingly well-read you are

Hearing the word “essay” probably filled you with dread at school, because it generally meant you had to write one. Chances are, that’s changed. The best essay collections – by proper writers and critics, rather than students pulling all-nighters – aren’t just celebrated in the literary world. They’re kind of cool . The modern critic, dispatching sharp analyses of the social media age from their New York or Berlin flat, has become a cult figure.

Of course, the essay and the essayist long preceded the viral online article. The best writing in the tradition can be both inward- or outward-looking, but it has to have an inquisitive, speculative spirit – two of the books below have “suppose” in their title, after all. And, most importantly, the prose has to be faultless. Here’s our pick of the best essay collections, from undisputed classics to underappreciated gems.

For all Zadie Smith ’s talents and successes as a novelist, some in the literary world think her real strength is non-fiction. They have a strong case: Feel Free , Smith’s second essay collection, is full of superb writing. She’s razor-sharp at times, but also unafraid to confess genuine love and admiration for the subject at hand. The book and exhibition reviews are deft, but the highlights come with weirder subjects: a meditation on joy, in relation to ecstasy and British rave culture, and an improbable but brilliant comparison between Justin Bieber and the philosopher Martin Buber.

Glenn O’Brien – a friend of Madonna , Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat – was a fixture of the Manhattan party scene for decades and surely one of the coolest men of the 20 th century. He also happened to be a phenomenal writer. Intelligence for Dummies is the only available collection of his work, which was published in a range of magazines including GQ . His acid, witty thoughts on politics, culture and style are still fresh decades after the events they describe. One essay on the Taliban blowing up religious images veers, masterfully, into O’Brien musing that America’s advertising billboards should be replaced with abstract paintings.

No essay list could omit the Sacramento-born master of literary non-fiction. Though Joan Didion’s books have become slightly overplayed signifiers of cool, their quality can’t be denied. The White Album , her second essay collection, is an obvious choice but the right one. All the cliches about the coolness and analytic power of her prose are accurate; so too is her reputation for getting to the core of 1960s counterculture, best seen in the masterly title essay.

Since its foundation in 2004, n+1 has established itself as one of America’s (and the Anglosphere’s) best literary magazines. This compilation, edited by the critic Christian Lorentzen, explains why that reputation is deserved. Highlights it picks out from the magazine’s early years include a polemic against exercise, a wry dispatch from the Miami party scene, and an examination of America’s warring literary cultures. The subtitle, “Say What You Mean”, sums up the dominant attitude of unpretentious intellectualism.

This compilation, co-edited by eminent New Journalist (and later novelist) Tom Wolfe, helped solidify the characteristics of The New Journalism: essentially, non-fiction with all the flashy prose and detailed characterisation of a novel. It provides a thrilling overview of the best magazine reporting from that era, and Wolfe’s introductory essay is very insightful too.

Along with Didion, the other obligatory feature for this list. Orwell is now best known for two of his novels, 1984 and Animal Farm , but he spent far more of his writing career on non-fiction. This bulky complete edition of his essays is great to browse through. Sometimes Orwell’s wrestling with grand questions of geopolitics and English identity; other times, he’s outlining his ideal pub , or meditating on the tradition of rude postcards in England’s seaside towns. Though his style is famously unflashy, it’s never short of insight or humour.

‘Unflashy’ is a word not often in the vicinity of David Foster Wallace, though, whose essays are just as expansive as his novels. This is the first of his non-fiction collections, and it includes a few of his career highlights: an intense, borderline-hallucinatory account of his visit to the 1993 Illinois State Fair; an analysis of the life and philosophical predicament of a mediocre professional tennis player; and the title essay, his dispatch from a Caribbean cruise, which spawned an entire mini-genre of journalists going on cruises and being snarky about them.

This collection has a simple premise: each essay analyses a single sentence. The sources of those sentences range from centuries-old writers like Shakespeare and John Donne to modern ones like Hilary Mantel. Many of them are, funnily enough, from essays themselves, although one of book’s highlights comes when Dillon looks at a Vogue picture caption written by Joan Didion at the beginning of her career. (“Opposite, above: All through the house, colour, verve, improvised treasures in happy but anomalous coexistence.” Not bad.)

Notes of a Native Son was published in 1955, a couple years after James Baldwin’s debut novel. It’s since become one of the main books confirming his reputation as a pivotal 20 th -century writer. He’s eloquent and endlessly well-read, but the essays never feel airless – in fact, their dissection of race relations in America (and in Europe, where Baldwin spent much of his time) are often brimming with cold fury. Highlights include the title essay, about Baldwin’s dysfunctional childhood, and one about the very different cultural heritages of Black Americans and Black people in France.

Wonder why the cinemas are always filled with sequels and reboots? This book by the late Mark Fisher, one of the most influential cultural theorists of the 21 st century, explains why. Ghosts of My Life ranges over all kinds of terrain: Jimmy Savile, the electronic producer Burial, Drake , John le Carré, primetime British TV and more. Fisher’s overriding thesis – encapsulated in the term “hauntology” – is that culture has become too exhausted to imagine the future. Instead, we’re dogged by “lost futures” in the form of what old sci-fi imagined our world would look like.

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The Top 10 Essays Since 1950

Robert Atwan, the founder of The Best American Essays series, picks the 10 best essays of the postwar period. Links to the essays are provided when available.

Fortunately, when I worked with Joyce Carol Oates on The Best American Essays of the Century (that’s the last century, by the way), we weren’t restricted to ten selections. So to make my list of the top ten essays since 1950 less impossible, I decided to exclude all the great examples of New Journalism--Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Michael Herr, and many others can be reserved for another list. I also decided to include only American writers, so such outstanding English-language essayists as Chris Arthur and Tim Robinson are missing, though they have appeared in The Best American Essays series. And I selected essays , not essayists . A list of the top ten essayists since 1950 would feature some different writers.

To my mind, the best essays are deeply personal (that doesn’t necessarily mean autobiographical) and deeply engaged with issues and ideas. And the best essays show that the name of the genre is also a verb, so they demonstrate a mind in process--reflecting, trying-out, essaying.

James Baldwin, "Notes of a Native Son" (originally appeared in Harper’s , 1955)

“I had never thought of myself as an essayist,” wrote James Baldwin, who was finishing his novel Giovanni’s Room while he worked on what would become one of the great American essays. Against a violent historical background, Baldwin recalls his deeply troubled relationship with his father and explores his growing awareness of himself as a black American. Some today may question the relevance of the essay in our brave new “post-racial” world, though Baldwin considered the essay still relevant in 1984 and, had he lived to see it, the election of Barak Obama may not have changed his mind. However you view the racial politics, the prose is undeniably hypnotic, beautifully modulated and yet full of urgency. Langston Hughes nailed it when he described Baldwin’s “illuminating intensity.” The essay was collected in Notes of a Native Son courageously (at the time) published by Beacon Press in 1955.

Norman Mailer, "The White Negro" (originally appeared in Dissent , 1957)

An essay that packed an enormous wallop at the time may make some of us cringe today with its hyperbolic dialectics and hyperventilated metaphysics. But Mailer’s attempt to define the “hipster”–in what reads in part like a prose version of Ginsberg’s “Howl”–is suddenly relevant again, as new essays keep appearing with a similar definitional purpose, though no one would mistake Mailer’s hipster (“a philosophical psychopath”) for the ones we now find in Mailer’s old Brooklyn neighborhoods. Odd, how terms can bounce back into life with an entirely different set of connotations. What might Mailer call the new hipsters? Squares?

Read the essay here .

Susan Sontag, "Notes on 'Camp'" (originally appeared in Partisan Review , 1964)

Like Mailer’s “White Negro,” Sontag’s groundbreaking essay was an ambitious attempt to define a modern sensibility, in this case “camp,” a word that was then almost exclusively associated with the gay world. I was familiar with it as an undergraduate, hearing it used often by a set of friends, department store window decorators in Manhattan. Before I heard Sontag—thirty-one, glamorous, dressed entirely in black-- read the essay on publication at a Partisan Review gathering, I had simply interpreted “campy” as an exaggerated style or over-the-top behavior. But after Sontag unpacked the concept, with the help of Oscar Wilde, I began to see the cultural world in a different light. “The whole point of camp,” she writes, “is to dethrone the serious.” Her essay, collected in Against Interpretation (1966), is not in itself an example of camp.

John McPhee, "The Search for Marvin Gardens" (originally appeared in The New Yorker , 1972)

“Go. I roll the dice—a six and a two. Through the air I move my token, the flatiron, to Vermont Avenue, where dog packs range.” And so we move, in this brilliantly conceived essay, from a series of Monopoly games to a decaying Atlantic City, the once renowned resort town that inspired America’s most popular board game. As the games progress and as properties are rapidly snapped up, McPhee juxtaposes the well-known sites on the board—Atlantic Avenue, Park Place—with actual visits to their crumbling locations. He goes to jail, not just in the game but in fact, portraying what life has now become in a city that in better days was a Boardwalk Empire. At essay’s end, he finds the elusive Marvin Gardens. The essay was collected in Pieces of the Frame (1975).

Read the essay here (subscription required).

Joan Didion, "The White Album" (originally appeared in New West , 1979)

Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and the Black Panthers, a recording session with Jim Morrison and the Doors, the San Francisco State riots, the Manson murders—all of these, and much more, figure prominently in Didion’s brilliant mosaic distillation (or phantasmagoric album) of California life in the late 1960s. Yet despite a cast of characters larger than most Hollywood epics, “The White Album” is a highly personal essay, right down to Didion’s report of her psychiatric tests as an outpatient in a Santa Monica hospital in the summer of 1968. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” the essay famously begins, and as it progresses nervously through cuts and flashes of reportage, with transcripts, interviews, and testimonies, we realize that all of our stories are questionable, “the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.” Portions of the essay appeared in installments in 1968-69 but it wasn’t until 1979 that Didion published the complete essay in New West magazine; it then became the lead essay of her book, The White Album (1979).

Annie Dillard, "Total Eclipse" (originally appeared in Antaeus , 1982)

In her introduction to The Best American Essays 1988 , Annie Dillard claims that “The essay can do everything a poem can do, and everything a short story can do—everything but fake it.” Her essay “Total Eclipse” easily makes her case for the imaginative power of a genre that is still undervalued as a branch of imaginative literature. “Total Eclipse” has it all—the climactic intensity of short fiction, the interwoven imagery of poetry, and the meditative dynamics of the personal essay: “This was the universe about which we have read so much and never before felt: the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying, unauthorized speeds.” The essay, which first appeared in Antaeus in 1982 was collected in Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982), a slim volume that ranks among the best essay collections of the past fifty years.

Phillip Lopate, "Against Joie de Vivre" (originally appeared in Ploughshares , 1986)

This is an essay that made me glad I’d started The Best American Essays the year before. I’d been looking for essays that grew out of a vibrant Montaignean spirit—personal essays that were witty, conversational, reflective, confessional, and yet always about something worth discussing. And here was exactly what I’d been looking for. I might have found such writing several decades earlier but in the 80s it was relatively rare; Lopate had found a creative way to insert the old familiar essay into the contemporary world: “Over the years,” Lopate begins, “I have developed a distaste for the spectacle of joie de vivre , the knack of knowing how to live.” He goes on to dissect in comic yet astute detail the rituals of the modern dinner party. The essay was selected by Gay Talese for The Best American Essays 1987 and collected in Against Joie de Vivre in 1989 .

Edward Hoagland, "Heaven and Nature" (originally appeared in Harper’s, 1988)

“The best essayist of my generation,” is how John Updike described Edward Hoagland, who must be one of the most prolific essayists of our time as well. “Essays,” Hoagland wrote, “are how we speak to one another in print—caroming thoughts not merely in order to convey a certain packet of information, but with a special edge or bounce of personal character in a kind of public letter.” I could easily have selected many other Hoagland essays for this list (such as “The Courage of Turtles”), but I’m especially fond of “Heaven and Nature,” which shows Hoagland at his best, balancing the public and private, the well-crafted general observation with the clinching vivid example. The essay, selected by Geoffrey Wolff for The Best American Essays 1989 and collected in Heart’s Desire (1988), is an unforgettable meditation not so much on suicide as on how we remarkably manage to stay alive.

Jo Ann Beard, "The Fourth State of Matter" (originally appeared in The New Yorker , 1996)

A question for nonfiction writing students: When writing a true story based on actual events, how does the narrator create dramatic tension when most readers can be expected to know what happens in the end? To see how skillfully this can be done turn to Jo Ann Beard’s astonishing personal story about a graduate student’s murderous rampage on the University of Iowa campus in 1991. “Plasma is the fourth state of matter,” writes Beard, who worked in the U of I’s physics department at the time of the incident, “You’ve got your solid, your liquid, your gas, and there’s your plasma. In outer space there’s the plasmasphere and the plasmapause.” Besides plasma, in this emotion-packed essay you will find entangled in all the tension a lovable, dying collie, invasive squirrels, an estranged husband, the seriously disturbed gunman, and his victims, one of them among the author’s dearest friends. Selected by Ian Frazier for The Best American Essays 1997 , the essay was collected in Beard’s award-winning volume, The Boys of My Youth (1998).

David Foster Wallace, "Consider the Lobster" (originally appeared in Gourmet , 2004)

They may at first look like magazine articles—those factually-driven, expansive pieces on the Illinois State Fair, a luxury cruise ship, the adult video awards, or John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign—but once you uncover the disguise and get inside them you are in the midst of essayistic genius. One of David Foster Wallace’s shortest and most essayistic is his “coverage” of the annual Maine Lobster Festival, “Consider the Lobster.” The Festival becomes much more than an occasion to observe “the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker” in action as Wallace poses an uncomfortable question to readers of the upscale food magazine: “Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?” Don’t gloss over the footnotes. Susan Orlean selected the essay for The Best American Essays 2004 and Wallace collected it in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (2005).

Read the essay here . (Note: the electronic version from Gourmet magazine’s archives differs from the essay that appears in The Best American Essays and in his book, Consider the Lobster. )

I wish I could include twenty more essays but these ten in themselves comprise a wonderful and wide-ranging mini-anthology, one that showcases some of the most outstanding literary voices of our time. Readers who’d like to see more of the best essays since 1950 should take a look at The Best American Essays of the Century (2000).

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10 Examples of Great College Essays (With Links)

The ticket to your dream college can be a piece of paper – your college essay. Picture yourself walking the halls of your ideal school, surrounded by opportunities and a bright future. Want to ensure your essay stands out? Dive into this guide. Beyond grades and test scores, the college decision process is influenced by recommendations, achievements, and extracurriculars. However, your college essay can be the ace up your sleeve. Explore the best essays of all time , and delve into how to craft your own . This list spotlights exemplary essays that unlocked the doors of top institutions. Discover what makes them shine, and let them guide your narrative. Need even more insights? Consider College Essay Essentials , a comprehensive resource packed with 24 standout essays.

10 Best Examples Of College Essays:

1. four examples of standout college application essays (2017 edition), 2. five examples of college application essays (2018 edition).

Once again, the team from the NY Times selected the best college admission essays from high school students. Out of over 300 submitted pieces of work, only these five were ultimately cut. Read them and see why.

3. 147 College Essays That Worked

The essays from this list are not your usual literary masterpieces, but they did the job and  allowed students to get access to some great universities such as UC Berkeley, Stanford, or Harvard. Read just a couple of them to fill your inspiration tank.

4. Eight Exceptional Essays From The Hamilton College

Here you can find some  nice examples of eight essays of successful applicants to Hamilton College. They were selected by Hamilton Alumni Review Magazine and showcased with the permission of students from various backgrounds.

5. A Single Sample College Application Essay (With Critique)

6. numerous essays that worked at the johns hopkins university.

Every year, the admissions committee selects some of the best and most creative essays that allow students to get enrolled in the university. As stated on the page, the most important thing about creating your statement is originality and the ability to share your own story uniquely. Demonstrating your precocious thought process matters the most. The best thing about these lists is that below each essay, you can find the actual comments from the admission committee. For example: We liked Stephen’s essay because it catches your attention right away and continues to show critical thinking, initiative, and problem-solving. His personality comes through as he naturally conveys humor. Through his anecdotes from growing up, we got a sense of how he might approach his studies here at Hopkins.”

7. Essays That Worked At Tufts University

Here’s another edition of examples that ultimately helped to enroll the students in the University. This list is great because it comes with videos, where the members of the admissions committee discuss different aspects of each essay and what made them so great.

8. Three Examples of Top College Essays

Writing a college essay may seem like a scary task, especially if you still don’t know where are you going to apply. You need to check some examples of inventive statements just to get a feel of what is expected. Then you can make up your mind and base your work on your unique circumstances.

9. An Essay Which Got The Student Into 14 Colleges (including Harvard and Princeton)

10. bonus: notes from top college officials about what makes a successful application essay.

This is not an example, but it’s still worth a read, as it will enable you to see essays from the admission officer’s perspective. Follow their suggestions and you can’t go wrong. I hope you enjoyed this list and that you’ve gained some valuable information from it. Applying for college and writing your essay is always stressful but hopefully, now you’re prepared. Please let me know about your struggles in the comments section below.

Rafal Reyzer

Hey there, welcome to my blog! I'm a full-time entrepreneur building two companies, a digital marketer, and a content creator with 10+ years of experience. I started RafalReyzer.com to provide you with great tools and strategies you can use to become a proficient digital marketer and achieve freedom through online creativity. My site is a one-stop shop for digital marketers, and content enthusiasts who want to be independent, earn more money, and create beautiful things. Explore my journey here , and don't miss out on my AI Marketing Mastery online course.

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The unconventional philosophy behind “founder mode”

• Main Story: Investor Paul Graham published a provocative essay on the approach to delegation by founders who are trying to grow their business.
• Graham challenges the prevailing management culture of hiring “professional fakers” and makes the case for Steve Jobs-esque “founder mode.”
• Also among this week’s stories: Why a high degree of company “vitality” matters in the long run, AI chip challengers, and economist Eugene Fama.

A few days ago, the investor Paul Graham published an essay with a provocative central insight: when it comes to growing a business, the conventional wisdom is almost always wrong.

Instead of shifting to “manager mode” as a company expands — i.e. delegating tasks to subordinates — the most successful startup CEOs will continue to stay in “founder mode” forever.

“Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs,” Paul writes. “Sounds great when it’s described that way, doesn’t it? Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.” He adds:

Key quote: “Whatever founder mode consists of, it’s pretty clear that it’s going to break the principle that the CEO should engage with the company only via his or her direct reports. ‘Skip-level’ meetings will become the norm instead of a practice so unusual that there’s a name for it. And once you abandon that constraint there are a huge number of permutations to choose from. For example, Steve Jobs used to run an annual retreat for what he considered the 100 most important people at Apple, and these were not the 100 people highest on the org chart. Can you imagine the force of will it would take to do this at the average company? And yet imagine how useful such a thing could be. It could make a big company feel like a startup.”

One factor that separates good investments from great ones

Harrison Moot, an investor at TDM Growth Partners, suggests in a recent memo that there is one key factor — often overlooked — that can predict a company’s long-term outperformance: its vi tality .

This trait — defined as a firm’s ability to successfully expand their total addressable market — won’t appear on an income statement or a balance sheet. Nor is it something that can be easily modeled into Excel. But in practice, Harrison writes, a high degree of vitality can lead to long-term exceptional outcomes for a handful of select companies.

“Vitality is only one of several factors in our assessment of a company’s growth prospects, but more than any other it separates the good investments from the great, multi-decade compounders,” he writes. “Our experience has shown that Vitality is often the key driver of long-duration growth and that growth is the primary driver of superior long-term investment returns.”

Key quote: “The nagging fear that all investors, particularly growth investors, are afraid of is a company ‘hitting the wall.’ A sudden deceleration in growth, not always explainable and often unexpected by both investors and management teams, typically resulting in a painful re-rate downwards… This is why Vitality, a company’s ability to successfully expand their total addressable market (‘TAM’) over time by developing new products and/or services, is so important. It extends the TAM and thus the potential for higher sustained growth.”

A few more links I enjoyed:

The AI chip startup that could take down Nvidia – via Freethink

Key quote: “In 2022, Etched’s co-founders decided to put all their chips on transformers (so to speak), betting that they would be important enough to the future of AI that a microchip optimized to run only transformer-based models would be incredibly valuable. ‘There aren’t that many people that are connected enough to AI companies to realize the opportunity and also crazy enough to take the bet — that’s where a couple 22-year-olds can come in and give it a swing,’ Etched co-founder Robert Wachen told Freethink.”

Large Positions – Ian Cassel

Key quote: “‍We normally hold 4-8 core positions (85% of portfolio) and another 4-5 smaller/tracking positions. I view our large core positions similar to veteran players on a sports team. Core positions have earned their right to their position size/salary. You’ve spent considerable time to get to know them. You’ve witnessed how the management and the business react under pressure. They’ve proven themselves and have earned your conviction and trust. The stock has rewarded you with good returns and you have rewarded the management/business with a bigger weighting in the portfolio.”

Economist Eugene Fama: ‘Efficient markets is a hypothesis. It’s not reality’ – via The Financial Times

Key quote: “Fama is arguably the world’s most famous and influential finance professor, thanks to his revolutionary efficient market hypothesis — that stock market prices at any time incorporate all available information, thanks to the cumulative and unending efforts of millions of investors constantly trying to outfox it. The paradox is that as a result of their efforts, the stock market is in practice almost impossible to beat.”

Brain Scientists Finally Discover the Glue that Makes Memories Stick for a Lifetime – via Scientific American

Key quote: “The persistence of memory is crucial to our sense of identity, and without it, there would be no learning, for us or any other animal. It’s little wonder, then, that some researchers have called how the brain stores memories the most fundamental question in neuroscience.”

From the archives:

What Is Strategy? – via Michael Porter (1996)

Key quote: “The root of the problem is the failure to distinguish between operational effectiveness and strategy. The quest for productivity, quality, and speed has spawned a remarkable number of management tools and techniques: total quality management, benchmarking, time-based competition, outsourcing, partnering, reengineering, change management. Although the resulting operational improvements have often been dramatic, many companies have been frustrated by their inability to translate those gains into sustainable profitability. And bit by bit, almost imperceptibly, management tools have taken the place of strategy. As managers push to improve on all fronts, they move farther away from viable competitive positions.”

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