Despite the countless forms of an essay, Edward Hoagland states that it hardly detaches itself from both the

essayist´s voice and persona, which

enhances its singularity among literary genres, as well as its adaptability to time and universe. Set to purpose, the essayist adjusts his ideas and stories
to convey meaning to the reader´s mind and soul, and progresses with artful and effective eloquence, which is the essay´s main asset.

What I Think, What I Am, by Edward Hoagland (1996)

Our loneliness makes us avid column readers these days. The personalities in The New York Post, Chicago Daily News,
San Francisco Chronicle constitute our neighbors now, some of them local characters but also the opinionated national stars.
And movie reviewers thrive on our need for somebody emotional who is willing to pay attention to us and return week after
week, year after year, through all the to‐and‐fro of other friends to flatter us by pouring out his (her) heart. They are
essayists, as Elizabeth Hardwick is, James Baldwin was. We sometimes hear that essays are an old‐fashioned form, that
so‐and‐so is the “last essayist,” but the facts of the marketplace argue quite otherwise. Essays of almost any kind are so
much easier for a writer to sell now than short stories, so many more see print, it's odd that though two fine anthologies
remain which publish the year's best stories, no comparable collection exists for essays. Such changes in the reading
public's taste aren't always to the good, needless to say. The art of telling stories predated even cave‐painting, surely; and if
we ever find ourselves living in caves again, it (with painting) will be the only art left, after movies, novels, essays,
photography, biography and all the rest have gone down the drain.

One has the sense with the short story form that while everything may have been done, nothing has been overdone: it has a
permanence. Essays, if a comparison is to be made, although they go back 400 years to Montaigne, seem a new-fangled,
mercurial, sometimes hokey sort of affair which has lent itself to many of the excesses of the age, from spurious
autobiography to spurious hallucination. as well as the shabby careerism of traditional journalism. It's a greased pig.

Essays, however, hang somewhere on a line between two sturdy poles: this is what I think, and this is what I am.
Autobiographies which aren't novels are ,generaily extended essays, indeed. A personal essay is like the human voice
talking, its order the mind's natural flow, instead of a systematized outline of ideas. Though more wayward or informal than
an article or treatise, somewhere it contains a point which is its real center, even if the point couldn't be expressed in fewer
words than the essayist has employed. Essays don't usually “boil down” to a summary, as articles do, but on the other hand
they have fewer “levels” than first‐rate fiction—a flatter surface—because we aren't supposed to argue about their meaning.
In the old distinction between teaching versus story‐telling however cleverly the author muddies up—an essay is intended to
convey the each of

This emphasis upon mind speaking to mind is what makes essays less universal in their appeal than stories. They are
addressed to an educated, perhaps a middleclass, reader, with certain presuppositions shared, a frame of reference, even a
commitment to civility—not the grand and golden empathy inherent in every man which the story‐teller has a chance to tap.
At the same time, of course, the artful “I” of an essay can be as chameleon as any narrator in fiction; and essays do tell a
story just as often as a short story stakes a claim to a particular viewpoint.

Mark Twain's piece called “Corn‐pone Opinions,” for example, which is about public opinion, begins with a vignette as vivid
as any in “Huckleberry Finn.” When he was a boy of 15, Twain says, he used to hang out a back window and listen to the
sermons preached by a neighbor's slave standing on top of a woodpile. The fellow “imitated the pulpit style of the several
clergymen of the village, and did it well and with fine passion and energy. To me he was a wonder. I believed he was the
greatest orator in the United States and would some day be heard from. But it did not happen; in the distribution of rewards
he was overlooked. He interrupted his preaching now and then to saw a stick of wood, but the sawing was a’ pretense—he
did it with his mouth; exactly imitating the sound the bucksaw makes in shrieking its way through the wood. But it served its
purpose, it kept his master from coming out

The extraordinary flexibility of essays is what has enabled them to ride oat rough weather and hybridize into forms to suit the
times. And just as one of the first things a fiction writer learns is that he needn't actually be writing fiction to write a short story
—he can tell his own history or anyone else's as exactly as he remembers it and it will still be “fiction” if it remains primarily a
story—an essayist soon discovers that he doesn't have to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth; he can shape or
shave his memories as long as the purpose is served of elucidating a truthful point. A personal essay frequently is not
autobiographical at all, but what it does keep in common with autobiography is that, through its tone and tumbling
progression, it conveys the quality of the author's mind. Nothing gets in the way. Because essays are directly concerned with
Despite the countless forms of an essay, Edward Hoagland states that it hardly detaches itself from both the essayist´s voice and persona, which
enhances its singularity among literary genres, as well as its adaptability to time and universe. Set to purpose, the essayist adjusts his ideas and stories
to convey meaning to the reader´s mind and soul, and progresses with artful and effective eloquence, which is the essay´s main asset.

the mind and its idiosyncrasy, the very freedom the mind possesses Is bestowed on this branch of literature that does honor
to it, and the fascination of the mind is the fascination.

Edward Hoagland has written fiction and essays in equal quantity; his new collection of essays is called “Red Wolves and
Black Bears.” says are associated with the way young writers fashion a name—on plain, crowded newsprint in hybrid
vehicles like The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, The Soho Weekly News (also Fiction magazine), instead of the thick paper
stock and thin readership of Partisan Review.