It seems to me that there are certain historical periods when the essay suddenly comes to the fore, and is popular and talked about and relevant, before sinking back into a more typically comatose, commercially wan state. The eighteenth-century periodic essay of Addison and Steele, and Samuel Johnson, the nineteenth-century Romantic essay with Hazlitt and Lamb, or the early decades of twentieth-century Britain with Virginia Woolf, Max Beerbohm and George Orwell, are all examples of such spikes. Another such efflorescence occurred during the post-World War II period of 1945, and lasted for a few decades, let us say until 1970. It was an exceptionally fertile period for essays in the United States: one would have to go back to the mid-nineteenth-century American Renaissance of Emerson, Thoreau, Melville and Margaret Fuller for a comparable flowering.
If we are to consider the essay in the broadest sense, not just personal, formal or academic essays but well-written ruminations or arguments that might occur in every discipline, the extent of such essayistic experiments in thought during this particular period will become apparent. Just to give you some idea of the range and talent of the essayists in that era: there was James Baldwin, E. B. White, Elizabeth Hardwick and Edmund Wilson; critics such as Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, Robert Warshow, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Edwin Denby, James Agee, Manny Farber, Parker Tyler, Pauline Kael, Irving Howe; policy pundits such as Walter Lippmann and George F. Kennan; theologians like Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr; novelists who moonlighted as essayists, including Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, John Updike, Flannery O’Connor, Gore Vidal; poet-essayists like Randall Jarrell, Adrienne Rich, W. H. Auden, Wallace Stevens; sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists and historians such as Robert K. Merton, Margaret Mead, Erving Goffman, Richard Hofstadter, Bruno Bettelheim and Viktor Frankl; nature and science writers, Loren Eiseley, Rachel Carson, Edward Hoagland, Annie Dillard, Lewis Thomas; food writers M. F. K. Fisher and A. J. Liebling; and New Journalists Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and Seymour Krim.
Why should this proliferation of the essay have occurred at this particular moment? I could offer several explanations.
