Great Essayists

I liked Christopher Hitchens too, and it was always fun to compare him to his brother (and opposite) Peter, who has a blog here. He's much more of the establishment right-wing, though, and that might not be your thing, but he can write pretty well when he wants to/isn't talking about immigrants.

You could check out Pepe Escobar's articles for Al Jazeera, too, for some brilliant global perspectives (it's hard to write about politics with such readability). For an interesting progressive take on American politics, I suggest Tom Engelhardt.

Happy reading.

E. B. White

Recommended great political/cultural essayists

H.L. Mencken
David Foster Wallace
Jonathan Franzen
Joan Didion (I don't care for her stuff, but many think she's the cat's whiskers)

Wolcott Gibbs. Check out the collection of his work from The New Yorker, Backward Ran Sentences, which was just published this past October. Good stuff.

What do people think of John D'Agata's essays?

Wow. No one's brought up the transcendentalists? Thoreau? Emerson? Even Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott's father, was an essayist and while a little loopy and now marginalized was expert with the form of the essay.

But when I think essayist, I think Thoreau and Emerson. Hands down.

John Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies is great.

I'd recommend The Art of the Personal Essay, edited by Phillip Lopate, for a nice anthology.

Adrienne Rich, Susan Sontag, Lewis Lapham

Mark Twain
Michel de Montaigne (essentially invented the essay form)
Bloggers--John Scalzi, Abi Sutherland, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, various writers at http://crookedtimber.org/
Virginia Woolf
Samuel "Chip" Delany

Johnathon Swift
Richard Wright (studied H.L. Mencken)
Nikki Giovanni
Octavia Butler

I'll toss out a bit of a wild-card: Loren Eiseley.

Eiseley, who died in the late 1970s, was by profession a paleontologist specializing in human origins. But he got into writing essays and poetry, and I first encountered his work in a high-school literature text. His interests were wide-ranging, he has lots of depth and unusual insights, and his writing is clear and stylish. His best collection of essays is The Immense Journey, from which the one in my high school text was taken. I'd also recommend The Firmament of Time and his wonderful history of the development of scientific thought in the 19th Century, Darwin's Century.

caw

A MINOR PLAYER WITH TOO MUCH TO READ

Part 1:

David Halberstam(1934-2007) arrived in Vietnam in the middle of 1962 to be a full-time Vietnam specialist for The New York Times. I was an 18 year old matriculation student in Ontario at the time and hoped to get into an arts degree program in 1963; I knew nothing of Halberstam. I also began my travelling-pioneering for the Canadian Baha’i community in that year. I did not come to read Halberstam until I retired from a 40 year working life in 1999.

In my first decade of retirement from FT work, 1999 to 2009, I began to read a host of essayists that I never had time to read in my working life as a teacher and tutor, lecturer and adult educator. My responsibilities as a member of the Baha’i community, as a parent of three children, as a volunteer for various associations, to say nothing of the inevitable social responsibilities that come from family and community activity also kept me far away from the major and famous essayists in the last half of the 20th century.

Part 2:

Halberstam was always about a dozen years ahead of me, having graduated as he did in 1955 with an arts degree from Harvard University. I graduated in 1967 with a similar degree and so began my 60 hour weeks involved as I indicated above until my retirement. I won’t tell you about Halberstam’s working life, nor mine other than to say: his literary life was highly distinguished. He wrote many books and received: (i) the Norman Mailer Prize in 2009 for Distinguished Journalism, and (ii) the Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for International Reporting.-Ron Price, Wikipedia, 7 July 2012.

[FONT=&quot]I read what I had to all through[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]my primary, secondary, & post-[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]secondary education: 1949-1967.[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]My interests began to fly at uni,[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]but there were always so many[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]books that had to get read if one[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]wanted to pass & go to the next[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]stage: & that was the way it was[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]until I became a permanent flier in[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]my role as teacher in colleges and[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]universities in Australia:1974-’99.[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]But I was & never will be in the race[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]with people like Halberstam. I found[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]my niche in the years: 1974 to 2012,[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]but it was always a niche tangentially[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]connected with so many other things[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]in life that I will remain a minor poet,[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]a minor player in the publishing game.[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]On the internet one’s writing gets lost[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]among 380 million sites, and 2 billion[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]players: time found in nanoseconds!!![/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]Ron Price[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]7 July 2012 [/FONT]