Why Essays Are So Damned Boring

This article is part of a package on creativity. For more, read "The Future of Creativity," "Bright Ideas from Baltimore’s Citizens," "The Creativity Conceit," "Art + Science= Inspiration," and "Putting the Arts Back into the Arts."

The essay is in a bad way. It’s not because essayists have gotten stupider. It’s not because they’ve gotten sloppier. And it is certainly not because they’ve become less anthologized. More anthologies are published now than there have been in decades, indeed in centuries. The Best American Essays series, which began in 1986, has reached 20 volumes. The problem is that anthologies end up in the basements of our local libraries, where they sit until they are released gratis to used-book stores that, in turn, will sell them for a buck apiece to college students who’ll place them next to their dorm beds and dump them in an end-of-semester clean-out.

Is it our fault? Are we, as readers, responsible for the decline of the American essay? Have we become lazier, less interested, less educated? Attention spans, to be sure, have shortened. Gone are the days when people pored languorously over periodicals during transatlantic crossings. But this is not the reason why essay collections gather dust and why essayists so often count themselves “second-class citizens” (in the words of E.B. White). If the genre is neglected in our day, it is first and foremost because its authors have lost their nerve. It is because essayists—and their editors, their anthologists, and the tastemakers on whom they depend—have lost the courage to address large subjects in a large way.

“The essayist is at his most profound when his intentions are most modest,” declares Joseph Epstein, the editor of The Norton Book of Personal Essays and the author of at least a dozen books of autobiographical essays. The essay is a “miniaturist” genre, intones another anthologist; it is “in love with littleness.” Sound ingratiating? Sweet? Self-deprecating? It is. It is also eye-crossingly dull. The essay that is considered “literature” in our day is not an ambitious or impassioned (if sometimes foolhardy) analysis of human nature. It is not an argument, or a polemic. It is not a gun-blazing attack on a social trend, a film, a book, or a library of books. Those sorts of pieces, sniff the anthologists, are mere journalism.