Recently a friend of mine who has been blogging for years emailed me for some advice. “Can you recommend some great essayists?” he asked. He wanted to take his writing to the next level. “I’m not talking about reportage.”

It’s an interesting distinction. Writing in Encyclopedia of the Essay (Tracy Chevalier, ed.), professor Joaquín Roy says “the history of the contemporary essay cannot be studied separately from the history of journalism. … Newspapers and magazines have been frequent vehicles for what history and the theory of literature consider to be essays.” Roy goes on to draw a line from strict who-what-where-when journalism through the New Journalism of the ’60s and ’70s to the offshoot that became “literary nonfiction,” as distinct from strict journalism.

(Some say journalism is being killed by memoir and the personal essay, but I disagree. I think it’s being killed by clickbait websites that pretend to journalism and other “newslike” media who use wannabe writers as reporters rather than being willing to pay for true, professional journalism by true, professional writers. But that’s another blog post for another time.)

I have to be in the mood for short stories (I can’t tell you why, honestly, except to say I just really like a novel) but I have always enjoyed literary nonfiction. Which is to say, personal essays. So I was prepared to give my friend some ideas.

First, I recommended writer (film critic, poet, essayist, novelist) Phillip Lopate’s To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction. Honestly, Lopate is the go-to guy if you want to learn the form: he’s also a teacher. He’s put together (as editor) several anthologies, including The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, which is used as a teaching text in a lot of MFA programs, since it’s basically a history of the personal essay, in examples. (Some of which you may have read during your school days.)

You learned how to write an essay in school too. “Compare and contrast,” your teacher said, or “Describe” or “Review.” These days you hear this sort of writing—voice and vision play important roles—called first-person nonfiction, literary nonfiction, narrative nonfiction, creative nonfiction … or, simply, the personal essay. (This college-level teacher—and author—calls it confessional writing.)

But you know me—I’m a reader first, editor second, writer last. (Writing’s hard, y’all. I take the path of least resistance.) There are lots of spectacular contemporary practitioners, too many to list, really, but I’ve read these (some years ago, some much more recently), so I can recommend them:

• Bill Bryson (I’m a Stranger Here Myself)
• Michael Chabon (Manhood for Amateurs)
• Meghan Daum (My Misspent Youth; The Unspeakable)
• Joan Didion (Slouching Towards Bethlehem; The White Album)
• Annie Dillard (Teaching a Stone to Talk; The Writing Life)
• Roxane Gay (Bad Feminist)
• Adam Gopnik (Paris to the Moon)
• Chirstopher Hitchens (Arguably)
• Nick Hornby (Songbook)
• Heidi Julavits (The Folded Clock)
• Sandra Tsing Loh (Depth Takes a Holiday)
• Frances Mayes (A Year in the World)
• Ann Patchett (This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage)
• Anna Quindlen (Living Out Loud; Thinking Out Loud)
• Marilynne Robinson (When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays)
• David Sedaris (Naked)
• Lewis Thomas (Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony)
• David Foster Wallace (Consider the Lobster)
• Patricia Williams (Open House)

If you’re looking for more suggestions, here’s a 2012 article from the Atlantic (“10 Contemporary American Essayists to Read Right Now”). For thirty years we’ve had an annual anthology of The Best American Essays, and the series’ founding editor picks the ten best essays of the postwar period in this Publishers Weekly article.

You may have read some great essays, too, without ever having lifted a book. Some of the best creative nonfiction I know shows up in travel magazines. And for years I read the back-page essays in Newsweek, alternating between Anna Quindlen and George Will. Quindlen never failed to delight me (here she writes about her old dog) and though Will and I sit on different sides of the political fence, he has written lovely essays about the game of baseball and movingly about his son Jon, who was born with Down syndrome. Today you can find what we often “consider to be essays” in magazines like the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, Esquire, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and others.

And that’s the thing, of course: you can learn a lot by reading good essayists. In case you want to take your writing to the next level too. 🙂

Tweet: Call it 1st-person nonfiction, literary-narrative-creative nonfiction—or the personal essay.
Tweet: You can learn a lot about writing by reading good essayists.

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