Word: essayist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...most personal, eccentric, and adaptable forms. "One damn thing after another," Aldous Huxley called it, "but in a sequence that in some miraculous way develops a central theme and relates it to the rest of human experience." In fact, in the annals of world literature, the unrestrained essayist (essai: attempt, trial, experiment) has always kept courageous and often dangerous company: Plato, Cicero, Carlyle, Swift, Twain, and scores of others who have helped forge our appreciation for clear thought and fresh language. Today the accomplishments of the modern essayist are no less important, and certainly no less varied and appealing...
Journalism has always been the first and best refuge of the essayist. Since the early 18th century when Joseph Addison and Richard Steele first put together the Tatler -- a thrice-weekly newspaper designed to elevate the moral and intellectual faculties of England's budding middle class -- the essayist has enjoyed constant if somewhat ambiguous employment as a member of the working press. Plying his trade under a variety of guises that have ranged from the timeless street scenes of Dickens 'Sketches by Boz to the out-and-out polemics of H.L. Mencken, the essayist has approached the inherent conflicting interests...
...even real ones, provided they can be kept at a respectable distance and performed with a touch of class. After all, murder can be the most romantic, if temporary, solution to a problem, which is why the Romantics could not get enough of it. Thomas De Quincey, the Romantic essayist, went so far as to propose "Murder as One of the Fine Arts." Historian Franklin Ford observed, in a brilliant article in Harvard magazine (February 1976), that throughout most of the 18th century there were no important political murders in Europe or America (until the final decade, when...
...Snow: 1905-1980 "I'm a fairly clever chap and can put my hand to things," C.P. Snow liked to say. The self-appraisal was a classic of good British understatement. Snow put his hand to a stunning variety of things. He was a novelist, essayist, biographer, physicist, playwright, civil servant, company director, government official. Member of Parliament, teacher and public lecturer. His death last week at age 74 brought to an end not one life but many...
Environmentalists view the world's wilderness areas as sacrosanct places that must be left untouched. Their concern strikes Essayist and Microbiologist Rene Dubos as ironic. Dubos, who is perhaps known best for his work in using microbes to produce disease-fighting drugs, points out that many of the areas weekend backpackers and others consider so beautiful resulted from degradation of the environment. The sere hills of Greece were produced by deforestation and erosion; the Downs of England owe their lushness to the introduction of sheep grazing; the orchards and fields of New England are the creation of civilization. "Humanized...