SOURCE: Butscher, Edward. “Essays of Our Time and Clime.” Georgia Review 55, no. 1 (spring 2001): 170-76.

In the following review essay, Butscher discusses The Penguin Book of Twentieth Century Essays, edited by Hamilton, and The Best American Essays of the Century, edited by Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Atwan. Butscher assertss that Hamilton's choice of essays for the Penguin anthology is ultimately disappointing.

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. 

—Francis Bacon

Michel de Montaigne is credited with inventing the essay (essai), although doubtless nudged in that direction by Seneca and Cicero, as well as by The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. A deeply divided self, limned affectionately by William Hazlitt as “a most magnanimous and undisguised egotist,” he also established the form as a persuasive epistemological and autobiographical vehicle: “I am myself the matter of my book.” Consequently, reading his “book” (actually several...