A reader suggested I create a meta-list of the best essays of all time, so I did. I found over 12 best essays lists and several essay anthologies and combined the essays into one meta-list. The meta-list below includes every essay that was on at least two of the original source lists. They are organized by rank, that is, with the essays on the most lists at the top. To see the same list organized chronologically, go HERE.
Note 1: Some of the essays are actually chapters from books. In such cases, I have identified the source book.
Note 2: Some of the essays are book-length, such as Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. One book listed as an essay by two listers – Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet – is also regularly categorized as a work of fiction.
On 11 lists
James Baldwin – Notes of a Native Son (1955)
On 6 lists
George Orwell – Shooting an Elephant (1936)
E.B. White – Once More to the Lake (1941)
Joan Didion – Goodbye To All That (1968)
On 5 lists
Joan Didion – On Keeping A Notebook (1968)
Annie Dillard – Total Eclipse (1982)
Jo Ann Beard – The Fourth State of Matter (1996)
David Foster Wallace – A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again (1996)
On 4 lists
William Hazlitt – On the Pleasure of Hating (1823)
Ralph Waldo Emerson – Self-Reliance (1841)
Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own (1928)
Virginia Woolf – The Death of a Moth (1942)
George Orwell – Such, Such Were the Joys (1952)
Joan Didion – In Bed (1968)
Amy Tan – Mother Tongue (1991)
David Foster Wallace – Consider The Lobster (2005)
On 3 lists
Jonathan Swift – A Modest Proposal(1729)
Virginia Woolf – Street Haunting: A London Adventure (1930)
John McPhee – The Search for Marvin Gardens (1972)
Joan Didion – The White Album (1968-1978)
Eudora Welty – The Little Store (1978)
Phillip Lopate – Against Joie de Vivre (1989)
On 2 lists
Sei Shonagon – Hateful Things (from The Pillow Book) (1002)
Yoshida Kenko – Essays in Idleness (1332)
Michel de Montaigne – On Some Verses of Virgil (1580)
Robert Burton – Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)
John Milton – Areopagitica(1644)
William Hazlitt – On Going a Journey (1822)
Charles Lamb – The Superannuated Man (1823)
Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience (1849)
Henry David Thoreau – Where I Lived, and What I Lived For (fromWalden) (1854)
Henry David Thoreau – Economy (fromWalden) (1854)
Henry David Thoreau – Walking (1861)
Robert Louis Stevenson – The Lantern-Bearers (1888)
Zora Neale Hurston – How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928)
George Orwell – A Hanging (1931)
Junichiro Tanizaki – In Praise of Shadows (1933)
Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet (1935)
James Agee and Walker Evans – Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941)
Simone Weil – On Human Personality (1943)
M.F.K. Fisher – The Flaw (1943)
Vladimir Nabokov – Speak, Memory (1951, revised 1966)
Mary McCarthy – Artists in Uniform: A Story (1953)
E.B. White – Goodbye to Forty-Eighth Street (1957)
Martin Luther King, Jr. – Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963)
Joseph Mitchell – Joe Gould’s Secret (1964)
Susan Sontag – Against Interpretation (1966)
Edward Hoagland – The Courage of Turtles (1970)
Annie Dillard – Seeing (fromPilgrim at Tinker Creek) (1974)
Maxine Hong Kingston – No Name Woman (from The Woman Warrior) (1976)
Roland Barthes – Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1982)
Annie Dillard – Living Like Weasels (1982)
Gloria E. Anzaldúa – How to Tame a Wild Tongue (1987)
Italo Calvino – Exactitude (1988)
Richard Rodriguez – Late Victorians (1990)
David Wojnarowicz – Being Queer in America: A Journal of Disintegration (1991)
Seymour Krim – To My Brothers & Sisters in the Failure Business (1991)
Anne Carson – The Anthropology of Water (1995)
Susan Sontag – Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)
Etel Adnan – In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005)
Paul LaFarge – Destroy All Monsters (2006)
Brian Doyle – Joyas Voladoras (2012)
