What an Essay Is
Essay title: What an Essay Is
An essay is a typically short piece of writing, from an authors personal point of view. Essays are non-fiction but often subjective; while expository, they can also include narrative. Essays can be literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author.
The definition of an essay is vague, overlapping with those of an article and a short story. Almost all modern essays are written in prose, but works in verse have been dubbed essays (e.g. Alexander Popes An Essay on Criticism and An Essay on Man). While brevity usually defines an essay, voluminous works like John Lockes An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Thomas Malthuss An Essay on the Principle of Population provide counterexamples.
The word essay derives from the French infinitive essayer, to try or to attempt. In English essay first meant a trial or an attempt, and this is still an alternative meaning. The first author to describe his works as essays was the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592); he used the term to characterize these as attempts to put his thoughts adequately into writing. Inspired in particular by the works of Plutarch, a translation of whose Oeuvres morales (Moral works) into French had just been published by Jacques Amyot, Montaigne began to compose his essays in 1572; the first edition, entitled Essais, was published in two volumes in 1580. For the rest of his life he continued revising previously published essays and composing new ones.
Francis Bacons essays, published in book form in 1597, 1612, and 1625, were the first works in English that described themselves as essays. Ben Jonson first used the word essayist in English in 1609, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
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