For more than 400 years the personal essay has been one of the richest and most vibrant of all literary forms. The Art of the Personal Essay is the first anthology to celebrate this lively, fertile genre. Distinguished from the formal essay by its friendly, conversational tone, its drive toward candor and confession, and its often quirky, first-person voice, the personal essay offers above all a feast of individuality. It seizes on the minutiae of daily life--fashions, rituals, vanities, family life, romantic foibles, the pleasures and pangs of solitude--and the great social and political issues of the day, from a daring opinionated perspective. Frequently humorous, the personal essay is perhaps the most instantly approachable and divertingly human type of nonfiction.
This robust tradition is represented here by more than seventy-five essays, beginning with influential forerunners from ancient Rome (Seneca, Plutarch) and the Far East to the mastering of the form by its sixteenth-century founder, Michel de Montaigne; through the golden age of the English essay (from Addision & Steele and Samuel Johnson through Orwell and Woolf) to its variegated outcroppings in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa, and its efflorescence in the United States.
