The Art of the Personal Essay

In his nonfiction book The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present (1994), American literary critic Phillip Lopate explores the history of personal essay-writing, from the first century C.E. up to the modern era in America. Lopate finds these essays to be a crucial component to understanding the lifestyles and social mores of people throughout history.

In the first chapter, "Forerunners," Lopate examines the work of Seneca the Younger, a Roman Stoic philosopher from the first century. Born around the year 3 C.E., Seneca was the son of the wealthy Roman writer Seneca the Elder. Through his essays, plays, and letters, Seneca was a pioneering figure in developing the philosophy of Stoicism, a school of thought that counsels people to live by a system of logic rather than be driven by the desire for pleasure or the fear of pain. His legacy as a Stoic was cemented when he calmly took his own life in the year 65 at the behest of Emperor Nero who suspected his involvement in an assassination plot.

One of Seneca's most famous essays is De Brevitate Vitae, or On the Shortness of Life. In it, he counters that life only feels short to those who have wasted it. People who cling to life generally do so because they haven't fully lived it, Seneca argues. Leisure and luxury, he adds, are not worthwhile pursuits but merely fleeting ones. Instead, the best way to live one's life is to do so with purpose and in harmony with nature. Lopate also identifies Of Anger as an important Seneca essay. In it, he characterizes feelings as choices; when one feels angry, one is actively rejecting calm and reason. Finally, Lopate singles out other personal essays from less well-known or completely unknown authors of Seneca's era that depict everyday life in Ancient Rome, such as a day at the public bathhouses or a funeral for a young daughter. These essays humanize those who lived in the past in a way that many other classical texts do not.



In "Fountainhead," Lopate considers the life and work of the 16th-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne. Though admired more as a statesman than an author during his lifetime, his writings helped popularize and legitimize the personal essay as a literary genre. His 1580 work, Essays, covers a wide range of topics both political and personal. In one, he expresses his strong opposition to European colonization of the Americas, decrying the suffering it creates for the region's indigenous inhabitants. A common thread across the essays is a mistrust of pure reason. He argues that while absolute truth exists, it is only attainable through divine revelation. In "Man's Knowledge Cannot Make Him Good," Montaigne coins the phrase "What do I know?" as his personal motto.

Lopate suggests that Montaigne's greatest legacy is in the way he has inspired other personal essayists over the past four centuries, particularly those of the English author and philosopher Francis Bacon. This discussion of Bacon and other English essayists makes up the longest part of the book, "The Rise of the English Essay." Lopate begins with Abraham Cowley whose essays predate those of Montaigne by a few years. Though largely remembered as a poet, Cowley wrote a number of important essays, including "Of Greatness" in which he argues that it is better to pursue "little things" rather than greatness. Other early English essayists include Joseph Addison and Richard Steele who published much of their work in The Spectator, a very early magazine the pair published from 1711 to 1712. Steele's essay “Inkle and Yarico” was instrumental in informing readers about the barbarities of the transatlantic slave trade, which England participated in and benefited from economically. Lopate goes on to explore the history of English essayists up to the 20th century. Important works from this period include 1929's A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf, which many consider one of the primary texts of feminism; and 1946's Politics and the English Language by George Orwell, which, connecting political rhetoric to the defilement of language, is frequently cited in discussions of 21st-century political propagandists.

In "Other Cultures, Other Continents," Lopate examines essays from writers in Russia, China, Japan, and elsewhere. He begins with a discussion of Ivan Turgenev's 1870 essay "The Execution of Troppmann," which concerns the public execution of a Frenchman who murdered his wife and six children. In it, Turgenev is disturbed by the mob element of public executions while considering the morality of capital punishment in general. Lopate also discusses the work of the early 20th-century essayist Lu Hsun, whom the author considers the greatest modern Chinese writer.



In the final chapter, "The American Scene," Lopate focuses on a number of essayists affiliated with the Transcendentalist movement, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. As Lopate moves on into the 20th century, he examines the work of The Baltimore Sun journalist and essayist H.L. Mencken; the activist and essayist James Baldwin whose thoughts on race, class, and sex were collected in his landmark Notes on a Native Son; and the public intellectual Gore Vidal whose essays in The Nation magazine rail passionately and eloquently against American militarism over the last half of the 20th century.

The Art of the Personal Essay is a valuable survey of important essayists over the past 2,000 years.