The classic essayists

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson's short essay on why giving and receiving gifts is so awkward, and what makes a gift right.

by Mark Twain

Twain argues that most people take their opinions from the people around them, out of a need for their approval.

by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt makes the case for travelling alone, with digressions on talk, solitude and the freedom of being unknown at an inn.

by Joseph Addison

Addison sets out the aims of The Spectator, the paper whose essays Benjamin Franklin rewrote from notes to teach himself to write.

by Charles Lamb

Lamb imagines telling stories of their family to two children he never had, in one of the best-known Essays of Elia.

by Michel de Montaigne

Montaigne reflects on his own poor memory and on lying, which he calls an accursed vice, in Charles Cotton's English translation.

by Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson describes how he taught himself to write by imitating the authors he admired, and the short-lived university magazine he helped found in Edinburgh.

by Edgar Allan Poe

Poe explains, step by step, how he says he wrote "The Raven": choosing the length, effect, tone and refrain before writing a line.