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
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.

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 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.