HN Explorer

Ask HN: Who are your favourite essayists?

18 points by michael_nielsen ↗ HN
Like many people, I discovered HN after reading several of PG's essays. I'd like to hear HNers recommendations for other essayists, especially essayists who aren't the usual tech suspects (PG, Clay Shirky, etc).

For example, a favourite essayist of mine is John McPhee, a long-time New Yorker staff writer. McPhee's writings don't seem to be online, but collections of his essays can be found in any good bookstore. I especially enjoyed "A Roomful of Hovings", a superb profile of a former curator of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, and "The Curve of Binding Energy", a profile of Ted Taylor, one of the most brilliant designers in the US nuclear weapon program, and also the visionary behind Project Orion (using nuclear power for interplanetary travel). A good place to start is the "John McPhee Reader" (http://www.amazon.com/John-McPhee-Reader/dp/0374517193); I was skeptical when I picked it up on a friend's recommendation, but found that I couldn't put it down.

21 comments

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kmort
I find a great sampling of many essayists is the Edge Foundation's yearly "world question".

Not only do you get a great set of short essays, but also some insight into many great minds on loosely the same question.

http://www.edge.org/questioncenter.html

Willwhatley
Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery (1976) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Selzer

I've read only this book of essays. His shining part is an unusually polished eloquence.

-- Most of Umberto Eco is interesting at least.

-- I like Montaigne. http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/montaigne/m-ess...

zoomzoom
Montaigne is also cool because he gets credit in most English deptartments for inventing the "essay" - at least in it's modern form. Kevin Kelly at kk.org is a good read for tech thinking.
alextp
A very good source of essays is the New Yorker magazine. I subscribe to the print version, but the online version is cheap, and many good essays are actually free on their website.
anukulrm
Matthew Arnold's essays are very interesting and fun to read. He is from lay 1800s but the writing is superb!
timruffles
Culture and Anarchy, or the others? What's it like reading from a US perspective (I'm UK)?
forkandwait
My grandfather's favorite essayist was E. B. White. He wrote for the New Yorker in the middle of the last century, as well as writing Charlotte's Web and a ton of other books. I don't remember the content of anything he wrote (except that rural Maine was really nice), but his prose style was amazing.
rwl
I love E. B. White. The year I read "One Man's Meat" (a collection of his New Yorker columns about his life in Maine from the WWII era), I think I gave it to six people for Christmas. He was a true master of the form.
dmlorenzetti
I really like Adam Gopnik, also from the New Yorker. He often teases out cultural or historical aspects of whatever topic he's on, and he can also make interesting analogies between disparate subjects.

I particularly liked his semi-regular "Paris Journal" pieces (now collected in "Paris to the Moon"). He used his life in Paris as a way of thinking about life in America. It included a brilliant extended comparison of President Clinton to the children's TV character Barney. "Barney is Bill Clinton for three-year-olds. Or rather, Bill Clinton is Barney for adults. He serves the same role for jumpy American liberals that Barney does for their children: He reassures without actually instructing..."

dvvarf
Michael Lewis gets amazing access for the pieces he writes about finance. Not too technical, but he really gets into the characters that are involved with different parts of the industry. He's also one of the lucky writers who can write about anything that piques his interest at a given time (Moneyball, Blind Side, and essays in the same vein), so those are worth checking out as well.

Atul Gawande is a great medicine writer. He was at Slate for a while, but he's been writing for the New Yorker for the last few years.

pathik
PG, hands down. Besides him, I also enjoy the writings of Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Richard Dawkins and some more.
Nicolo_Borghi
Italo Calvino and his "Six Memos for the next millennium" should be a must-read for every developer/entrepreneur

He speaks about literature but I personally see the Memos having a lot in common with how to make a lean startup.

They are:

   1. Lightness
   2. Quickness
   3. Exactitude
   4. Visibility
   5. Multiplicity
schn
Dijkstra is very entertaining.