best essays ever written

A curated list of essays that are well-crafted, impactful, and diverse in topics and styles. Each essay has a direct link, a summary, and some writing tips to learn from.

A meta-list of the best essays of all time based on over 12 lists and several anthologies. See the rankings, authors, titles, and sources of the essays from different genres, periods, and styles.

The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade

Robert Atwan, the founder of The Best American Essays series, selects the 10 best essays of the postwar period by American writers. He explains why each essay is deeply personal, engaged, and reflective, and provides links to read them online.

A list of the best essay collections from classic to contemporary, personal to critical, by writers like Didion, Wallace, Baldwin, and more. Find out which books made the cut and why they deserve a place in the literary canon.

Adam Gopnik, essayist and PEN prize judge, recommends five books of essays that bear witness to personal and political themes. Learn about the criteria, the winners and the shortlisted authors of this prestigious award.

Longreads Best of 2020: Essays. A small sampling of standout essays published this year. All Best of Longreads illustrations by Kjell Reigstad. All through December, we're featuring Longreads' Best of 2020. This year, our editors picked and featured hundreds of beautifully written and poignant essays published on the web.

Robert Atwan's favorite lit­er­ary genre is the essay. As edi­tor and founder of The Best Amer­i­can Essays series, Atwan has read thou­sands of exam­ples of the remark­ably flex­i­ble form. "Essays can be lots of things, maybe too many things," writes Atwan in his fore­ward to the 2012 install­ment in the Best Amer­i­can series, "but at the core ...

Art & Ardor — Cynthia Ozick. 5. The Art of the Personal Essay — anthology, edited by Phillip Lopate. 6. Bad Feminist — Roxane Gay. 7. The Best American Essays of the Century — anthology, edited by Joyce Carol Oates. 8. The Best American Essays series — published every year, series edited by Robert Atwan.

Walter Kirn. Lists about novelists, poets, short story authors, journalists, essayists, and playwrights, from simple rankings to fun facts about the men and women behind the pens. Over 1K readers have voted on the 75+ Best Essayists Of All Time, Ranked. Current Top 3: Michel de Montaigne, George Orwell, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

6. Melissa Febos: " The Wild, Sublime Body ". This essay appeared in Best American Essays 2022 after being published in The Yale Review, and showcases the best of Febos, in that it is intensely corporeal. Febos's personal essay has a very clear subject—her body and her relationship with her body.

Besides essays on Book Riot, I love looking for essays on The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Rumpus, and Electric Literature. But there are great nonfiction essays available for free all over the Internet. From contemporary to classic writers and personal essays to researched ones—here are 25 of my favorite nonfiction essays you can read today.

The "Porcelain God" College Essay Example. Essay written for the "topic of your choice" prompt for the 2012 Common Application college application essays. Bowing down to the porcelain god, I emptied the contents of my stomach. Foaming at the mouth, I was ready to pass out.

Essays are a powerful form of expression that can captivate readers with their profound insights, emotional resonance, and thought-provoking ideas. Whether you're a literature enthusiast, a writing aficionado, or simply someone looking for inspiration, delving into some of the best essays ever written can be a transformative experience.

Read it here. A gorgeous mini-essay from an American giant that is equally relevant to writers of poetry or prose, and is almost a poem itself. "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader ...

A collection of the year's best essays, selected by award-winning journalist and New Yorker staff writer Kathryn Schulz "The world is abundant even in bad times," guest editor Kathryn Schulz writes in her introduction, "it is lush with interestingness, and always, somewhere, offering up consolation or beauty or humor or happiness, or at least the hope of future happiness."

-David Yaffe (). 4. Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos (Catapult) 13 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed Read an excerpt from Body Work here "In her new book, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, memoirist Melissa Febos handily recuperates the art of writing the self from some of the most common biases against it: that the memoir is a lesser form ...

Zadie Smith's Intimations, Helen Macdonald's Vesper Flights, Claudia Rankine's Just Us, and Samantha Irby's Wow, No Thank You all feature among the Best Reviewed Essay Collections of 2020. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub's "Rotten Tomatoes for books.". 1.

A reader suggested I create a meta-list of the best essays of all time, so I did. I found over 12 best essays lists and several essay anthologies and combined the essays into one meta-list. The meta-list below includes every essay that was on at least two of the original source lists. They are organized chronologically, by date of publication.

Orwell is now best known for two of his novels, 1984 and Animal Farm, but he spent far more of his writing career on non-fiction. This bulky complete edition of his essays is great to browse through.

Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me by Bill Hayes. "Bill Hayes came to New York City in 2009 with a one-way ticket and only the vaguest idea of how he would get by. But, at forty-eight years old, having spent decades in San Francisco, he craved change.

3. Orwell's Roses by Rebecca Solnit. (Viking) 12 Rave • 13 Positive • 1 Mixed. Read an excerpt from Orwell's Roses here. "… on its simplest level, a tribute by one fine essayist of the political left to another of an earlier generation.

7. Essays That Worked At Tufts University. Here's another edition of examples that ultimately helped to enroll the students in the University. This list is great because it comes with videos, where the members of the admissions committee discuss different aspects of each essay and what made them so great. 8.