Types of the Essay

Excerpt from Types of the Essay

When you write a letter to a friend, you tell him what you and others have been doing, what you have seen, and what you think about various things. People who write books do the same thing on a larger scale. A book that tells what you have done is an autobiography; a book telling what others have done is biography or history, or if it deals with imaginary people, it is fiction. A book telling what you have seen is travel, and a book telling what you think on various topics is a book of essays. Yet not all books giving people's thoughts are essays. If a man writes a book on religion or philosophy, for example, a book made up of various chapters, arrranged in such order as to form a systematic and complete treatment of the subject, that book would not be called an essay but a treatise. The word essay comes from the French essai, an attempt, an endeavor. So Francis Bacon, the first English essayist, said in the preface to his book: "To write just treatises requireth leisure in the writer and leisure in the reader,... which is the cause that hath made me choose to write certain brief notes, set down rather significantly than curiously, which I have called essays."

This gives us the second characteristic of the essay: it is brief, and does not attempt to treat a subject either completely or systematically. In fact, an essay is a sort of literary go-as-you-please. An essayist may, like Montaigne, announce as his subject "Coaches," and proceed to write about sneezing, the entertainments of Roman emperors, and the conquest of Mexico, with only a brief mention of coaches.

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