Word: essayist
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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...
...course, for America's foremost contemporary reporter-turned-essayist, Joan Didion. When Didion undertakes a character profile -- her piece on James Pike, the Episcopalian Bishop of California, for example -- she doesn't begin with the subject, his family, philosophy, or even a recitation of his favorite food (as did Janet Flanner in a 1936 profile of Adolph Hitler). Rather, Didion begins the piece with a word about her own recollection of Pike's church, and then characteristically proceeds to lace the narrative with what she calls elsewhere, "always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable 'I.'" "The greatest study of Mann is Mann...
Edward Hoagland is another essayist who has earned his style through adversity. A novelist of modest reputation before turning to the essay (Cat Man in 1956 and The Circle Home in 1960), Hoagland has spent much of his childhood and adult life as a stutterer. ("Being in these vocal handcuffs made me a devoted writer at twenty. I worked like a dog, choosing each word.") Hoagland's style is consonant with the idea that the essay is a variety of "conversational writing." Unshackled, Hoagland converses recklessly, wildly, an abundance of critical detail and blinding enthusiasm fueling his abrupt transitions from...
Hoagland is hardly the first observer of animals and lairs to balance between the rough call of the woods and the concentrated frenzy of big city living. Since Thoreau, the American essayist has been torn by the happy agony of deciding whether to leave the city for the country, and upon leaving, when to return. Nowadays the tension of two homes is stock-in-trade for the essayist, though few display the pertinacious ease and delight with acquired folkways that distinguish both Hoagland and his counterpart, John McPhee...