W. E. B. Du Bois exchanging visiting cards or mourning a firstborn. Virginia Woolf dining on an unappetizing dish of prunes and custard. George Orwell shooting an elephant. James Baldwin trying to be pleasant while yet another small Swiss child reaches out to touch his hair.

Some of the most-read, most-written-about, most-anthologized, most-assigned essays in English are personal protest essays. The personal essay form, with its mix of narration and reflection, lends itself to exploring intersections between individual experience and structures of injustice. As a result, for well over a century, essayists have written about themselves to protest the political status quo. They have placed their experiences in a political context to make them newly meaningful to themselves and to others. They have used their essays as a place to mourn, rage, contend, critique, assert, incite, revise and reckon. Whether writing about instances of everyday awkwardness or searing encounters with violence or death (or those awful moments that are simultaneously both), they have tried to write a significance for their lives that extends beyond themselves, and to turn an individual experience into a collective one. In giving readers new and necessary political language – ‘double-consciousness’, ‘a room of one’s own’ – essays have paved the way for or participated in political movements.

As critics have noted, the personal protest essay tradition has been particularly influential in the United States. Though neither book focuses on the personal essay in particular, both Brian Norman’s The American Protest Essay and National Belonging: Addressing Division and Cheryl A. Wall’s On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay examine the intimate relationship between the personal and the political in American essays from the nineteenth century onwards. Norman’s book tells ‘[a] story of the protest essay embedded in both the European personal essay and American political oratory’, and argues that ‘[t]he inextricability of the personal and political, or the immediate and enduring, gets at the essence of the American protest essay’. Meanwhile Wall explores the political preoccupations at the heart of the African American personal essay: ‘Even the most personal essays in the African American tradition continually engage the subject of freedom.