About essayists...

Personal essayists are truly a rare breed of writer. They are in a class all by themselves. For only the personal essayist deals lightly, often humorously, with personal experiences, opinions, and prejudices, stressing especially the unusual or novel in attitude and having to do with the varied aspects of everyday life. Personal essayists rely on style and personality, rather than reason and fact. Elizabeth Hardwick referred to this phenomenon as "the soloist's personal signature flowing through the text."

The single quality of the personal essay that sets it apart from all others is its intimacy. Essayists actually "converse" with their readers because they are already having dialogues and disputes with themselves! This particular writing characteristic creates an immediate emotional bond between the essayist and the audience. Above all, when writing personal essays, keep in mind that intimacy and trust go hand in hand. Great essayists incorporate trust, sincerity, and frankness into their writings. Without these three crucial factors, the essayist's reliability becomes questionable.

Finally, we come to the "golden rule" for all personal essayists: the use of the first person "I." When writing formal essays, most academicians frown upon the use of "I." However, is it possible for the true personal essayist to omit "I?" Certainly not! The pure intimacy and nature of the personal essay makes the use of "I" mandatory. In the words of Alexander Smith, "it is this egotism, this perpetual reference to self, in which the charm of the essayist resides. If a man is worth knowing, he is worth knowing well."

Critiques of my favorite essayists...

• Joan Didion (1934-      ) has been a major figure in the revival of the contemporary American essay. Her pieces began appearing in mass magazines in the sixties, and she was a key practitioner of that decade's New Journalism, which combined reportage with personal, subjective disclosure. A novelist (Play It as It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer) as well as an essayist, Didion has shown an uncanny ability to create atmosphere on the page. Like Raymond Chandler, she captured, through telling detail, the sun-desolate, alienated side of suburban California's pleasure principle; unlike Chandler, however, her ominous mood-setting was in the service not of murder mystery but of something more unsettling: an existential questioning whether any meaningful story can be made of our lives. In her three essay collections, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, The White Album, and After Henry, she perfected the technique of gathering fragments to convey the randomness and absence of narrative coherence in contemporary life. One of the things that makes her essays so fascinating is her will as a formalist to keep them structurally tight, even as she obstinately denies that the pieces "add up."
  
  The end of innocence - disenchantment - is a frequent Didion motif, but its positive side, she implies, is the acquisition of worldliness, so necessary to a country she sees as imperially naive. Didion has written extensive political commentary, usually critical of the power structure. A fastidious prose stylist, she has produced work that has grown in syntactical complexity and intellectual density over the years, sometimes to the point of mannerism. But, like Lamb, Mencken, and Vidal, she is not afraid of being mannered or irritating; she rather celebrates her crabby, migrainous persona, as in the lovely personal essay In Bed. ~Phillip Lopate~

• Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher (1908-1992) has an enigmatic place in American letters, being perhaps undervalued as a serious writer and overvalued, or at least over mystified, as a cult figure. Many regard her as the patron saint and paragon of modern food writing. She herself said, "I do not consider myself a food writer." Yet, a good deal of her output was for magazines such as Food and Wine and Gourmet. Certainly food was her primary subject matter, and her achievement was to use this seemingly mundane concern as a metaphor for the analysis of human appetite, disappointment, and rapture. Her most persona (and best) book, The Gastronomical Me, gives us glimpses of a rather hard life - the failure of her first marriage, the illness and death of her beloved second husband, the cowardly behavior of many Europeans during World War II - through the scrim of an education in eating. As she said once in an interview, "One has to live, you know. You can't just die from grief or anything. You don't die. You might as well eat well, have a good glass of wine, a good tomato." It is this stoical realism that fleshes out her epicurean search and gives it depth.
  
  Stylistically, Fisher had a taste for aphorisms, sentences of compressed wit that boldly cut through any dithering. Sometimes the reader is left hungry for more of her life - intentionally so. She practiced a discipline of restraint and omission, creating essentially an oblique, dignified, detached persona rather than a chatty, confessional one. Nonetheless, she could be disarmingly and alarmingly honest. Her very satisfying personal essays about cooking, which appeared originally in The New Yorker and were collected in With Bold Knife and Fork, display a casual erudition and an anecdotal warmth. Fisher translated Brillat-Savarin's The Physiology of Taste, and her writing was increasingly informed by a historical perspective on food preparation. W.H. Auden once called her the best American prose stylist alive, a compliment that seems in retrospect more provocative than considered; but there is no question that her writing is of a very high order and gives pleasure even to those who don't especially care about food. ~Phillip Lopate~

• Edward Hoagland (1932-      ) is generally acknowledged to be one of the leading American essayists of the current era. He began writing essays in 1968 and has remained faithful to this barely remunerative form with a steadfastness matched by few of his generation. His essay collections include The Courage of Turtles, Walking the Dead Diamond River, Red Wolves and Black Bears, The Tugman's Passage, Heart's Desire, and Balancing Acts. He has also written several novels, most notably Seven Rivers West.
  
  A disciple of Thoreau, Hoagland has written extensively on nature; his descriptions have the rapt, observant character and serene appreciation of a professional woodsman or navigator. He is also a great wanderer, willing to go anywhere and bring back a report, in travel writing of a superior order. A native New Yorker, he has what he calls a "city rat" side as well, and is one of the few ecologically minded nature writers who does not feel called upon to attack urban life while extolling the virtues of rural solitude.
  
  Hoagland, like the classical personal essayists before him, utilizes the eccentricities and flaws in his character to bring an essay alive. In The Courage of Turtles, we see the Hoagland persona in an amiable, caring vein. In The Threshold and the Jolt of Pain, we see him in a more biting, confessional aspect. These essays also demonstrate the characteristic qualities of Hoagland's prose style: densely textured, imagistic sentences that reach a lyricism that one normally associates with the prose poem. ~Phillip Lopate~

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