The Essay

A short prose composition that explores a subject from a personal or exploratory point of view rather than attempting to exhaust it, a distinction built into the form's name: the French essayer, to try or attempt. The form is generally credited to Michel de Montaigne, whose Essais, first published in 1580, used the word for the first time in its literary sense to describe short, digressive, self examining prose pieces. Francis Bacon's Essays, published soon after, introduced a terser, more aphoristic English variant, and the two founding models, Montaigne's meandering personal voice and Bacon's compressed argumentative one, remain the form's two poles, running through later essayists from Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt to James Baldwin and Joan Didion.