American Essays

The charm of the essay lies in the fact that it is not formal, that it may be whimsical in its point of departure, and capricious in its ramblings after it has got itself under way. --Introduction, Brander Mathews

Hooray for expired copyrights! Brander Matthews's The Oxford Book of American Essays (1914) is available online via Bartleby.com. Some of America's finest essay-writers appear here (of the--ahem--male persuasion . . . after all, these selections were made with academia's prejudices of 1914).

When speaking of the essay, Northwest College professor Renee Dechert refers to Montaigne, saying that the essay form allows us to watch "a mind at work"--to observe an intelligence work its way through the tangle of thought.