The Essay as Attempt: A History of the Most Honest Form in Literature
There is a word problem at the heart of this piece. “Essay” has come to mean something dutiful and slightly joyless, the five-paragraph structure, the thesis statement, the conclusion that restates the introduction. Something produced under obligation. Something marked.
This is not what the essay is. Or rather, it is not what the essay was, before it became a school assignment.
The word comes from the French essai, attempt. A trying-out. A thinking-in-progress. And when you understand that, the form opens up entirely. The essay is not a delivery mechanism for conclusions already reached. It is the record of a mind in the act of reaching them.
Montaigne: The Invention of the Attempt
Michel de Montaigne published the first Essais in 1580, in the tower of his château in Bordeaux, and in doing so invented a form that is still being reinvented four hundred years later.
He was not trying to write philosophy, or history, or moral instruction. He was trying to record something harder to pin down: what it felt like to be him, thinking, in the particular moment of his particular life. “I study myself more than any other subject,” he wrote. “It is my metaphysics; it is my physics.”
What made this revolutionary was the voice. Personal, conversational, free to digress, free to contradict itself, free to leave questions unanswered. Montaigne moves from cannibalism to experience to idleness to friendship to the nature of the self, not because these things are systematically connected but because one thought leads to another, the way actual thinking works, rather than the way arguments are supposed to work.
The essay, from its first moment, is a form built on honesty about uncertainty.
Bacon: The Other Lineage
Francis Bacon published his Essayes in English in 1597, and they could not be more different from Montaigne’s.
Where Montaigne wanders, Bacon is compressed. Where Montaigne confesses, Bacon instructs. His essays , “Of Studies,” “Of Friendship,” “Of Truth”, are aphoristic, didactic, almost epigrammatic. They offer counsel, not confession. They are aimed at the public world of power and policy, not the private world of self-examination.
From these two men descend the two great lineages of the essay: the familiar essay, intimate and exploratory, and the formal essay, analytical and outward-facing. Most essays worth reading borrow from both.
The Periodical Age: Essays for a Public
The 18th century gave the essay its first mass audience. Richard Steele and Joseph Addison’s The Spectator and The Tatler brought the form into coffee houses and drawing rooms, addressing the new urban middle class on matters of manners, taste, and moral conduct.
These were social essays, written to shape a public, to refine it, to make it more civil. Samuel Johnson deepened this tradition in The Rambler, turning the periodical essay toward moral philosophy and psychological observation, meditating on suffering, ambition, and the instability of human happiness.
In this period, the essay was doing important cultural work: it was teaching people how to live, how to read, how to behave. It was the forerunner of everything from the newspaper column to the podcast.
The Romantics: The Essay Turns Inward
In the early 19th century, the essay became something more personal again. William Hazlitt wrote with passionate argumentativeness about politics, painting, drama, and the nature of pleasure. Charles Lamb perfected the familiar essay, nostalgic, whimsical, self-revealing, in his Essays of Elia, meditating on London life and memory and the strangeness of being alive.
Thomas De Quincey pushed further still, blending personal confession with gothic excess in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. The self was no longer merely the narrator of the essay, it was the subject.
This matters because it established something important: the essay could be about interiority. It could be a form for examining the inner life as seriously as the outer world.
Emerson and Thoreau: The American Essay
In America, the essay took on a different quality, grander, more prophetic, more concerned with the founding of a new sensibility than with the refinement of an existing one.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays, “Self-Reliance,” “Nature,” “The American Scholar”, are lyric, aphoristic, spiritually charged. They attempt to think an American consciousness into being. Henry David Thoreau extended this project in “Civil Disobedience” and Walden, combining close attention to the natural world with radical political and ethical reflection.
In both writers, the essay is not just a literary form but a philosophical tool, a way of insisting on the primacy of individual experience and individual conscience.
The Modernists: The Essay Fractures and Expands
Virginia Woolf brought the essay into the 20th century and made it new. Her critical essays on reading, biography, and women’s education blend modernist technique: free association, interior movement, with cultural analysis. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas turn the essay into feminist argument without losing any of its literary texture.
T.S. Eliot, in essays like “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” used the form to advance an aesthetic programme and reframe the relationship between individual writers and the literary tradition. Edmund Wilson, in Axel’s Castle and beyond, made the essay a vehicle for synthetic literary criticism aimed at a general educated readership.
The modernist essay shares with modernist fiction a preoccupation with fractured perception and cultural crisis. It is no longer merely instructive or confessional, it is diagnostic.
New Journalism: The Essay Meets the World
From the 1960s, a new kind of essayistic writing emerged that fused literary technique with reportage. Tom Wolfe theorised it, Joan Didion perfected it, James Baldwin had already been doing something like it for years.
New Journalism brought scene-setting, extended dialogue, subjective perspective and dense descriptive detail into nonfiction. Didion’s essays on 1960s California — in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, combined close observation with a minimalist, self-implicating voice. Baldwin’s essays in The Fire Next Time brought memoir, political analysis and the cadences of the sermon together to confront race and power in America.
What these writers understood was that the essay could be fully literary without abandoning factual engagement. Voice, style and argument were not ornaments, they were methods of knowing.
The Contemporary Renaissance
The essay is everywhere now. David Foster Wallace’s essays, on cruise ships, state fairs, television, and language, combined encyclopedic reporting with deep self-consciousness about the ethics of looking at others. Zadie Smith’s criticism brings a novelist’s attentiveness to identity, aesthetics and cultural change. Rachel Cusk has made the confessional essay analytically cool and formally rigorous. Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts pushed the form toward what critics now call “autotheory”, memoir, critical theory and cultural criticism woven into something that doesn’t quite have a name yet.
Why is the essay thriving? Because we live in an age that needs orientation more than information. Facts are abundant; interpretation is scarce. The essay’s visible “I” — its willingness to say this is what I think, and here is how I came to think it — is precisely what distinguishes it from everything else we read.
It is, as Montaigne understood, an attempt. Not a conclusion but a process. Not an answer but a way of asking.
That, in an age of confident assertions and algorithmic certainty, feels more valuable than ever.
Further reading: begin with Montaigne’s Essays (any Screech translation), then Hazlitt’s Selected Essays* Woolf’s The Common Reader, Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, and Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem.