Essay Hunger: Devouring Essays in the 21st Century

Every man has within himself the entire human condition.

—Michel de Montaigne

In most books the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

Have we digressed, however? I hope so.

—William H. Gass, "Emerson and the Essay"

I wanted to title this "Essay Lust," but that seemed too sensual a forward leap in connection with a genre that a mere century ago was associated with genteel three-named authors in three-piece suits. Nevertheless, we are talking about the essay's current and future status in the twenty-first century, so I'll settle here for "Essay Hunger"—a quality universal, perennial, with connotations of both craving and lust. Indeed, as a culture, a nation, we hunger for essays, for essays catch us in the act of being human. As long as human beings have a future, so do essays; they capture the quintessence of the human condition. They can be on any subject, even one initially of little interest or consequence to the reader. But it's the essayist's engaging rendering, the individual point of view, that makes readers care—perhaps vitally—about some topic they may never have thought about before. As E. B. White says, the essayist "can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter—philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur...devil's advocate, enthusiast." This variety of roles has resulted in innumerable varieties of nonfiction prose. It is nevertheless daunting to see that essays, a catchall heading in the Library of Congress subject classification, yields an eclectic 10.7 entries, the first page of which includes the James Madison papers, the Thomas Jefferson papers, the annotated text of Thoreau's "Walking," Carl Sandburg's essays, and the Sigmund Freud Archives. In dismaying contrast, googling "essay," even with over 174 billion hits, yields scores of entries for term paper mills and ads for innumerable "admissions essays"—including ghostwritten pleas to graduate schools, law schools, and yes, medical schools.

Yet just as Molière's Bourgeois Gentleman was delighted to learn that he had been speaking prose all his life, twenty-first-century Americans should be delighted to have finally settled on a single term for the many varieties of prose that they've been reading all their lives: "essays." No longer does "essay"—unlike other literary genres such as novels or poetry—have to be defined every time a critic uses the term, even in essay anthologies, as it was during the first twenty-two years of the Best American Essays (inaugurated in 1986). Finally, or so it seems to the contributors to this ABR Focus on "The Future of the Essay," the term is obvious. We—i.e., readers of short nonfiction prose in print and on the Internet, where it may be integrated with sound and sight (see "The Video Essay," page 14)—know an essay when we see it. We recognize such familiar examples as portraits, confessions, reportage, commentary, op-ed pieces, reviews. We also recognize essays appearing in what Elizabeth Hardwick calls "a condition of unexpressed hyphenation"—"the critical essay, the autobiographical essay, the travel essay, the political...," and I would add, essays about food, nature, spirituality, sports, science, or medicine for general readers—other topical categories in the Best American series. In addition to topical categories, each category of which elicits millions of hits on the Internet, so too do we identify new forms of essays themselves, erupting and abounding in the twenty-first century. Indeed, proof that the Best American series has become establishment are the anti-establishment spoofs, such as the "Best American" categories that since 2006 have comprised the first fifty pages of The Best American Nonrequired Reading, including "Best American WikiLeaks Revelations" and "Best American Lawsuits."

Creative nonfiction essays prevail today; they are to longer creative nonfiction as short stories are to the novel. Creative nonfiction tells...