What Letters and Essays argues
- This is the hexagonal gallery of the two great forms of reflective prose: the letter and the essay. Both are intimate, exploratory, and unsystematic — the writer thinking aloud on the page rather than building a treatise. Together they are the literature of the examined mind at its most companionable.
- The essay was invented twice. In the West Montaigne named it — essai, 'an attempt' — and Bacon naturalised it in English; but the East had reached it five centuries earlier in Sei Shōnagon's zuihitsu, 'following the brush.' The letter is older still: Cicero's correspondence and Seneca's moral epistles to Lucilius made the private letter a public art and the direct ancestor of the essay itself.
- From these roots grows a single tradition of prose that argues, confesses, and digresses: Descartes staging philosophy as first-person narrative, Milton defending the free press, Lamb and Hazlitt perfecting the Romantic familiar essay, Emerson writing American transcendentalism into his letters, and Nietzsche turning the essay into polemic. Eleven public-domain works, each one a mind at work in prose.
- Every card shows an Internet Archive scan of the work itself — a title page or cover — marked as a representative image (imageKind: secondary), since these are scans of the books rather than author portraits. All eleven works are in the public domain.
Primary works in Letters and Essays (11)
- Cicero — The Letters of Cicero (c. 50 BCE) — Book · read the full text
- Seneca — Moral Letters to Lucilius (Epistulae Morales) (c. 65 CE) — Book · read the full text
- Sei Shōnagon — The Pillow Book (c. 1002) — Book · read the full text
- Michel de Montaigne — The Letters of Montaigne (1580) — Book · read the full text
- Francis Bacon — The Essays (1625) — Book · read the full text
- René Descartes — A Discourse on Method (1637) — Book · read the full text
- John Milton — Areopagitica (1644) — Book · read the full text
- Charles Lamb — The Letters of Charles Lamb (1837) — Book · read the full text
- William Hazlitt — Sketches and Essays (1839) — Book · read the full text
- Friedrich Nietzsche — On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) — Book · read the full text
- Ralph Waldo Emerson — Letters from Ralph Waldo Emerson to a Friend (1899) — Book · read the full text
Chambers connected to Letters and Essays
- Wisdom Literature — The essay and the moral letter are the modern heirs of wisdom literature: where Ptahhotep and Proverbs handed down maxims, Seneca, Montaigne, and Bacon turn the maxim into reflective, first-person prose — counsel that argues with itself.
- Writing Fiction and Poetry — Both hexagonal galleries hold the literature of literature. Where Writing Fiction and Poetry theorises the made work, the essay is thought performing itself on the page — Montaigne's essai and Bacon's counsels are criticism, autobiography, and craft at once.
- First Novels — The familiar essay and the personal letter are the seedbed of first-person prose fiction: the epistolary novel grows directly out of the literary letter, and the essayist's confiding voice becomes the narrator's.