The Essayists
Explore classic essays from 51 writers — Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Orwell, Twain and many more
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Sherwood Anderson
Gertrude Atherton
Clara Barton
Frédéric Bastiat
Ivan Bunin
G.K. Chesterton
Cornelia A. P. Comer
Frederick Douglass
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Theodore Dreiser
W.E.B. Du Bois
Alexandre Dumas
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Johnathan Edwards
T.S. Eliot
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Benjamin Franklin
Maxim Gorky
Kenneth Grahame
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Ernest Hemingway
Oliver Wendell Holmes
William Dean Howells
Victor Hugo
Washington Irving
Henry James
Thomas Jefferson
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Aleksandr I. Kuprin
Henry Lawson
Jack London
Henrik Willem van Loon
James Madison
Herman Melville
H.L. Mencken
John Stuart Mill
A.A. Milne
Florence Nightingale
Kathleen Norris
George Orwell
Thomas Paine
Edgar Allan Poe
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Robert Louis Stevenson
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Henry David Thoreau
Mark Twain
Booker T. Washington
H.G. Wells
Walt Whitman
Oscar Wilde
Selections to Get You Started
Self-Reliance
On Civil Disobedience
What to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?
Shooting an Elephant
I Have a Dream
The Declaration of Independence
The American Crisis
Politics and the English Language
Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences
The Decay of Lying
Nature
Walking
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
The Philosophy of Composition
A Defence of Poetry
What Life Means To Me
Poor Richard's Almanack
Why I Write
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
adorned by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.
Read more from Ralph Waldo Emerson