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The Ten Best American Essays Since 1950, According to Robert Atwan

in Books , Literature | November 15th, 2012 3 Comments

“Essays can be lots of things, maybe too many things,” writes Atwan in his foreward to the 2012 installment in the Best American series, “but at the core of the genre is an unmistakable receptivity to the ever-shifting processes of our minds and moods. If there is any essential characteristic we can attribute to the essay, it may be this: that the truest examples of the form enact that ever-shifting process, and in that enactment we can find the basis for the essay’s qualification to be regarded seriously as imaginative literature and the essayist’s claim to be taken seriously as a creative writer.”

In 2001 Atwan and Joyce Carol Oates took on the daunting task of tracing that ever-shifting process through the previous 100 years for The Best American Essays of the Century . Recently Atwan returned with a more focused selection for Publishers Weekly : “The Top 10 Essays Since 1950.” To pare it all down to such a small number, Atwan decided to reserve the “New Journalism” category, with its many memorable works by Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Michael Herr and others, for some future list. He also made a point of selecting the best essays , as opposed to examples from the best essayists. “A list of the top ten essayists since 1950 would feature some different writers.”

We were interested to see that six of the ten best essays are available for free reading online. Here is Atwan’s list, along with links to those essays that are on the Web:

James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son,” 1955 (Read it here .)
Norman Mailer, “The White Negro,” 1957 (Read it here .)
Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” 1964 (Read it here .)
John McPhee, “The Search for Marvin Gardens,” 1972 (Read it here with a subscription.)
Joan Didion, “The White Album,” 1979
Annie Dillard, “Total Eclipse,” 1982
Phillip Lopate, “Against Joie de Vivre,” 1986 (Read it here .)
Edward Hoagland, “Heaven and Nature,” 1988
Jo Ann Beard, “The Fourth State of Matter,” 1996 (Read it here .)
David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Lobster,” 2004 (Read it here in a version different from the one published in his 2005 book of the same name.)

“To my mind,” writes Atwan in his article, “the best essays are deeply personal (that doesn’t necessarily mean autobiographical) and deeply engaged with issues and ideas. And the best essays show that the name of the genre is also a verb, so they demonstrate a mind in process–reflecting, trying-out, essaying.”

To read more of Atwan’s commentary, see his article in Publishers Weekly .

The photo above of Susan Sontag was taken by Peter Hujar in 1966.

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The Top 10 Essays Since 1950

Robert Atwan, the founder of The Best American Essays series, picks the 10 best essays of the postwar period. Links to the essays are provided when available.

Fortunately, when I worked with Joyce Carol Oates on The Best American Essays of the Century (that’s the last century, by the way), we weren’t restricted to ten selections. So to make my list of the top ten essays since 1950 less impossible, I decided to exclude all the great examples of New Journalism--Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Michael Herr, and many others can be reserved for another list. I also decided to include only American writers, so such outstanding English-language essayists as Chris Arthur and Tim Robinson are missing, though they have appeared in The Best American Essays series. And I selected essays , not essayists . A list of the top ten essayists since 1950 would feature some different writers.

To my mind, the best essays are deeply personal (that doesn’t necessarily mean autobiographical) and deeply engaged with issues and ideas. And the best essays show that the name of the genre is also a verb, so they demonstrate a mind in process--reflecting, trying-out, essaying.

James Baldwin, "Notes of a Native Son" (originally appeared in Harper’s , 1955)

“I had never thought of myself as an essayist,” wrote James Baldwin, who was finishing his novel Giovanni’s Room while he worked on what would become one of the great American essays. Against a violent historical background, Baldwin recalls his deeply troubled relationship with his father and explores his growing awareness of himself as a black American. Some today may question the relevance of the essay in our brave new “post-racial” world, though Baldwin considered the essay still relevant in 1984 and, had he lived to see it, the election of Barak Obama may not have changed his mind. However you view the racial politics, the prose is undeniably hypnotic, beautifully modulated and yet full of urgency. Langston Hughes nailed it when he described Baldwin’s “illuminating intensity.” The essay was collected in Notes of a Native Son courageously (at the time) published by Beacon Press in 1955.

Norman Mailer, "The White Negro" (originally appeared in Dissent , 1957)

An essay that packed an enormous wallop at the time may make some of us cringe today with its hyperbolic dialectics and hyperventilated metaphysics. But Mailer’s attempt to define the “hipster”–in what reads in part like a prose version of Ginsberg’s “Howl”–is suddenly relevant again, as new essays keep appearing with a similar definitional purpose, though no one would mistake Mailer’s hipster (“a philosophical psychopath”) for the ones we now find in Mailer’s old Brooklyn neighborhoods. Odd, how terms can bounce back into life with an entirely different set of connotations. What might Mailer call the new hipsters? Squares?

Read the essay here .

Susan Sontag, "Notes on 'Camp'" (originally appeared in Partisan Review , 1964)

Like Mailer’s “White Negro,” Sontag’s groundbreaking essay was an ambitious attempt to define a modern sensibility, in this case “camp,” a word that was then almost exclusively associated with the gay world. I was familiar with it as an undergraduate, hearing it used often by a set of friends, department store window decorators in Manhattan. Before I heard Sontag—thirty-one, glamorous, dressed entirely in black-- read the essay on publication at a Partisan Review gathering, I had simply interpreted “campy” as an exaggerated style or over-the-top behavior. But after Sontag unpacked the concept, with the help of Oscar Wilde, I began to see the cultural world in a different light. “The whole point of camp,” she writes, “is to dethrone the serious.” Her essay, collected in Against Interpretation (1966), is not in itself an example of camp.

John McPhee, "The Search for Marvin Gardens" (originally appeared in The New Yorker , 1972)

“Go. I roll the dice—a six and a two. Through the air I move my token, the flatiron, to Vermont Avenue, where dog packs range.” And so we move, in this brilliantly conceived essay, from a series of Monopoly games to a decaying Atlantic City, the once renowned resort town that inspired America’s most popular board game. As the games progress and as properties are rapidly snapped up, McPhee juxtaposes the well-known sites on the board—Atlantic Avenue, Park Place—with actual visits to their crumbling locations. He goes to jail, not just in the game but in fact, portraying what life has now become in a city that in better days was a Boardwalk Empire. At essay’s end, he finds the elusive Marvin Gardens. The essay was collected in Pieces of the Frame (1975).

Read the essay here (subscription required).

Joan Didion, "The White Album" (originally appeared in New West , 1979)

Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and the Black Panthers, a recording session with Jim Morrison and the Doors, the San Francisco State riots, the Manson murders—all of these, and much more, figure prominently in Didion’s brilliant mosaic distillation (or phantasmagoric album) of California life in the late 1960s. Yet despite a cast of characters larger than most Hollywood epics, “The White Album” is a highly personal essay, right down to Didion’s report of her psychiatric tests as an outpatient in a Santa Monica hospital in the summer of 1968. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” the essay famously begins, and as it progresses nervously through cuts and flashes of reportage, with transcripts, interviews, and testimonies, we realize that all of our stories are questionable, “the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.” Portions of the essay appeared in installments in 1968-69 but it wasn’t until 1979 that Didion published the complete essay in New West magazine; it then became the lead essay of her book, The White Album (1979).

Annie Dillard, "Total Eclipse" (originally appeared in Antaeus , 1982)

In her introduction to The Best American Essays 1988 , Annie Dillard claims that “The essay can do everything a poem can do, and everything a short story can do—everything but fake it.” Her essay “Total Eclipse” easily makes her case for the imaginative power of a genre that is still undervalued as a branch of imaginative literature. “Total Eclipse” has it all—the climactic intensity of short fiction, the interwoven imagery of poetry, and the meditative dynamics of the personal essay: “This was the universe about which we have read so much and never before felt: the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying, unauthorized speeds.” The essay, which first appeared in Antaeus in 1982 was collected in Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982), a slim volume that ranks among the best essay collections of the past fifty years.

Phillip Lopate, "Against Joie de Vivre" (originally appeared in Ploughshares , 1986)

This is an essay that made me glad I’d started The Best American Essays the year before. I’d been looking for essays that grew out of a vibrant Montaignean spirit—personal essays that were witty, conversational, reflective, confessional, and yet always about something worth discussing. And here was exactly what I’d been looking for. I might have found such writing several decades earlier but in the 80s it was relatively rare; Lopate had found a creative way to insert the old familiar essay into the contemporary world: “Over the years,” Lopate begins, “I have developed a distaste for the spectacle of joie de vivre , the knack of knowing how to live.” He goes on to dissect in comic yet astute detail the rituals of the modern dinner party. The essay was selected by Gay Talese for The Best American Essays 1987 and collected in Against Joie de Vivre in 1989 .

Edward Hoagland, "Heaven and Nature" (originally appeared in Harper’s, 1988)

“The best essayist of my generation,” is how John Updike described Edward Hoagland, who must be one of the most prolific essayists of our time as well. “Essays,” Hoagland wrote, “are how we speak to one another in print—caroming thoughts not merely in order to convey a certain packet of information, but with a special edge or bounce of personal character in a kind of public letter.” I could easily have selected many other Hoagland essays for this list (such as “The Courage of Turtles”), but I’m especially fond of “Heaven and Nature,” which shows Hoagland at his best, balancing the public and private, the well-crafted general observation with the clinching vivid example. The essay, selected by Geoffrey Wolff for The Best American Essays 1989 and collected in Heart’s Desire (1988), is an unforgettable meditation not so much on suicide as on how we remarkably manage to stay alive.

Jo Ann Beard, "The Fourth State of Matter" (originally appeared in The New Yorker , 1996)

A question for nonfiction writing students: When writing a true story based on actual events, how does the narrator create dramatic tension when most readers can be expected to know what happens in the end? To see how skillfully this can be done turn to Jo Ann Beard’s astonishing personal story about a graduate student’s murderous rampage on the University of Iowa campus in 1991. “Plasma is the fourth state of matter,” writes Beard, who worked in the U of I’s physics department at the time of the incident, “You’ve got your solid, your liquid, your gas, and there’s your plasma. In outer space there’s the plasmasphere and the plasmapause.” Besides plasma, in this emotion-packed essay you will find entangled in all the tension a lovable, dying collie, invasive squirrels, an estranged husband, the seriously disturbed gunman, and his victims, one of them among the author’s dearest friends. Selected by Ian Frazier for The Best American Essays 1997 , the essay was collected in Beard’s award-winning volume, The Boys of My Youth (1998).

David Foster Wallace, "Consider the Lobster" (originally appeared in Gourmet , 2004)

They may at first look like magazine articles—those factually-driven, expansive pieces on the Illinois State Fair, a luxury cruise ship, the adult video awards, or John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign—but once you uncover the disguise and get inside them you are in the midst of essayistic genius. One of David Foster Wallace’s shortest and most essayistic is his “coverage” of the annual Maine Lobster Festival, “Consider the Lobster.” The Festival becomes much more than an occasion to observe “the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker” in action as Wallace poses an uncomfortable question to readers of the upscale food magazine: “Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?” Don’t gloss over the footnotes. Susan Orlean selected the essay for The Best American Essays 2004 and Wallace collected it in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (2005).

Read the essay here . (Note: the electronic version from Gourmet magazine’s archives differs from the essay that appears in The Best American Essays and in his book, Consider the Lobster. )

I wish I could include twenty more essays but these ten in themselves comprise a wonderful and wide-ranging mini-anthology, one that showcases some of the most outstanding literary voices of our time. Readers who’d like to see more of the best essays since 1950 should take a look at The Best American Essays of the Century (2000).

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Nonfiction Books » Essays

The best essays: the 2021 pen/diamonstein-spielvogel award, recommended by adam gopnik.

WINNER OF the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich

Every year, the judges of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay search out the best book of essays written in the past year and draw attention to the author's entire body of work. Here, Adam Gopnik , writer, journalist and PEN essay prize judge, emphasizes the role of the essay in bearing witness and explains why the five collections that reached the 2021 shortlist are, in their different ways, so important.

Interview by Benedict King

Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick

Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays by Robert Michael Pyle

Terroir: Love, Out of Place by Natasha Sajé

Maybe the People Would be the Times by Luc Sante

The Best Essays: the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award - Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich

1 Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich

2 unfinished business: notes of a chronic re-reader by vivian gornick, 3 nature matrix: new and selected essays by robert michael pyle, 4 terroir: love, out of place by natasha sajé, 5 maybe the people would be the times by luc sante.

W e’re talking about the books shortlisted for the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay . As an essayist yourself, or as a reader of essays, what are you looking for? What’s the key to a good essay ?

Let’s turn to the books that made the shortlist of the 2021 PEN Award for the Art of the Essay. The winning book was Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich , whose books have been recommended a number of times on Five Books. Tell me more.

One of the criteria for this particular prize is that it should be not just for a single book, but for a body of work. One of the things we wanted to honour about Barbara Ehrenreich is that she has produced a remarkable body of work. Although it’s offered in a more specifically political register than some essayists, or that a great many past prize winners have practised, the quiddity of her work is that it remains rooted in personal experience, in the act of bearing witness. She has a passionate political point to make, certainly, a series of them, many seeming all the more relevant now than when she began writing. Nonetheless, her writing still always depends on the intimacy of first-hand knowledge, what people in post-incarceration work call ‘lived experience’ (a term with a distinguished philosophical history). Her book Nickel and Dimed is the classic example of that. She never writes from a distance about working-class life in America. She bears witness to the nature and real texture of working-class life in America.

“One point of giving awards…is to keep passing the small torches of literary tradition”

Next up of the books on the 2021 PEN essay prize shortlist is Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick.

Vivian Gornick is a writer who’s been around for a very long time. Although longevity is not in itself a criterion for excellence—or for this prize, or in the writing life generally—persistence and perseverance are. Writers who keep coming back at us, again and again, with a consistent vision, are surely to be saluted. For her admirers, her appetite to re-read things already read is one of the most attractive parts of her oeuvre , if I can call it that; her appetite not just to read but to read deeply and personally. One of the things that people who love her work love about it is that her readings are never academic, or touched by scholarly hobbyhorsing. They’re readings that involve the fullness of her experience, then applied to literature. Although she reads as a critic, she reads as an essayist reads, rather than as a reviewer reads. And I think that was one of the things that was there to honour in her body of work, as well.

Is she a novelist or journalist, as well?

Let’s move on to the next book which made the 2021 PEN essay shortlist. This is Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays by Robert Michael Pyle.

I have a special reason for liking this book in particular, and that is that it corresponds to one of the richest and oldest of American genres, now often overlooked, and that’s the naturalist essay. You can track it back to Henry David Thoreau , if not to Ralph Waldo Emerson , this American engagement with nature , the wilderness, not from a narrowly scientific point of view, nor from a purely ecological or environmental point of view—though those things are part of it—but again, from the point of view of lived experience, of personal testimony.

Let’s look at the next book on the shortlist of the 2021 PEN Awards, which is Terroir: Love, Out of Place by Natasha Sajé. Why did these essays appeal?

One of the things that was appealing about this book is that’s it very much about, in every sense, the issues of the day: the idea of place, of where we are, how we are located on any map as individuals by ethnic identity, class, gender—all of those things. But rather than being carried forward in a narrowly argumentative way, again, in the classic manner of the essay, Sajé’s work is ruminative. It walks around these issues from the point of view of someone who’s an expatriate, someone who’s an émigré, someone who’s a world citizen, but who’s also concerned with the idea of ‘terroir’, the one place in the world where we belong. And I think the dialogue in her work between a kind of cosmopolitanism that she has along with her self-critical examination of the problem of localism and where we sit on the world, was inspiring to us.

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Last of the books on the shortlist for the 2021 Pen essay award is Maybe the People Would Be the Times by Luc Sante.

Again, here’s a writer who’s had a distinguished generalised career, writing about lots of places and about lots of subjects. In the past, he’s made his special preoccupation what he calls ‘low life’, but I think more broadly can be called the marginalized or the repressed and abject. He’s also written acute introductions to the literature of ‘low life’, the works of Asbury and David Maurer, for instance.

But I think one of the things that was appealing about what he’s done is the sheer range of his enterprise. He writes about countless subjects. He can write about A-sides and B-sides of popular records—singles—then go on to write about Jacques Rivette’s cinema. He writes from a kind of private inspection of public experience. He has a lovely piece about tabloid headlines and their evolution. And I think that omnivorous range of enthusiasms and passions is a stirring reminder in a time of specialization and compartmentalization of the essayist’s freedom to roam. If Pyle is in the tradition of Thoreau, I suspect Luc Sante would be proud to be put in the tradition of Baudelaire—the flaneur who walks the streets, sees everything, broods on it all and writes about it well.

One point of giving awards, with all their built-in absurdity and inevitable injustice, is to keep alive, or at least to keep passing, the small torches of literary tradition. And just as much as we’re honoring the great tradition of the naturalist essay in the one case, I think we’re honoring the tradition of the Baudelairean flaneur in this one.

April 18, 2021

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Adam Gopnik

Adam Gopnik has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1986. His many books include A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism . He is a three time winner of the National Magazine Award for Essays & Criticism, and in 2021 was made a chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur by the French Republic.

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Celebs Who Wrote Children's Books

History's Greatest Essayists

Michel de Montaigne

George Orwell

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Francis Bacon

James Baldwin

Samuel Johnson

Joan Didion

G. K. Chesterton

Virginia Woolf

C. S. Lewis

Bertrand Russell

Jonathan Swift

Leo Tolstoy

Christopher Hitchens

Aldous Huxley

Charles Lamb

Jorge Luis Borges

Arthur Schopenhauer

Susan Sontag

T. S. Eliot

Benjamin Franklin

David Foster Wallace

Victor Hugo

E. B. White

Evelyn Waugh

William Hazlitt

Henry James

Yukio Mishima

Lists about novelists, poets, short story authors, journalists, essayists, and playwrights, from simple rankings to fun facts about the men and women behind the pens.

100 Must-Read Essay Collections

Rebecca Hussey

Rebecca holds a PhD in English and is a professor at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut. She teaches courses in composition, literature, and the arts. When she’s not reading or grading papers, she’s hanging out with her husband and son and/or riding her bike and/or buying books. She can't get enough of reading and writing about books, so she writes the bookish newsletter "Reading Indie," focusing on small press books and translations. Newsletter: Reading Indie Twitter: @ofbooksandbikes

View All posts by Rebecca Hussey

There’s something about a shiny new collection of essays that makes my heart beat a little faster. If you feel the same way, can we be friends? If not, might I suggest that perhaps you just haven’t found the right collection yet? I don’t expect everyone to love the thought of sitting down with a nice, juicy personal essay, but I also think the genre gets a bad rap because people associate it with the kind of thing they had to write in school.

Well, essays don’t have to be like the kind of thing you wrote in school. Essays can be anything, really. They can be personal, confessional, argumentative, informative, funny, sad, shocking, sexy, and all of the above. The best essayists can make any subject interesting. If I love an essayist, I’ll read whatever they write. I’ll follow their minds anywhere. Because that’s really what I want out of an essay — the sense that I’m spending time with an interesting mind. I want a companionable, challenging, smart, surprising voice in my head.

So below is my list, not of essay collections I think everybody “must read,” even if that’s what my title says, but collections I hope you will consider checking out if you want to.

1. Against Interpretation — Susan Sontag

2. Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere — André Aciman

3. American Romances — Rebecca Brown

4. Art & Ardor — Cynthia Ozick

5. The Art of the Personal Essay — anthology, edited by Phillip Lopate

6. Bad Feminist — Roxane Gay

7. The Best American Essays of the Century — anthology, edited by Joyce Carol Oates

8. The Best American Essays series — published every year, series edited by Robert Atwan

9. Book of Days — Emily Fox Gordon

Book cover of The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard

10. The Boys of My Youth — Jo Ann Beard

11. The Braindead Megaphone — George Saunders

12. Broken Republic: Three Essays — Arundhati Roy

13. Changing My Mind — Zadie Smith

14. A Collection of Essays — George Orwell

15. The Common Reader — Virginia Woolf

16. Consider the Lobster — David Foster Wallace

17. The Crack-up — F. Scott Fitzgerald

18. Discontent and its Civilizations — Mohsin Hamid

19. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric — Claudia Rankine

20. Dreaming of Hitler — Daphne Merkin

21. Self-Reliance and Other Essays — Ralph Waldo Emerson

22. The Empathy Exams — Leslie Jameson

23. Essays After Eighty — Donald Hall

24. Essays in Idleness — Yoshida Kenko

25. The Essays of Elia — Charles Lamb

26. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader — Anne Fadiman

27. A Field Guide to Getting Lost — Rebecca Solnit

28. Findings — Kathleen Jamie

29. The Fire Next Time — James Baldwin

30. The Folded Clock — Heidi Julavits

31. Forty-One False Starts — Janet Malcolm

32. How To Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America — Kiese Laymon

33. I Feel Bad About My Neck — Nora Ephron

34. I Just Lately Started Buying Wings — Kim Dana Kupperman

35. In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction — anthology, edited by Lee Gutkind

36. In Praise of Shadows — Junichiro Tanizaki

37. In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens — Alice Walker

38. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? — Mindy Kaling

39. I Was Told There’d Be Cake — Sloane Crosley

40. Karaoke Culture — Dubravka Ugresic

41. Labyrinths — Jorge Luis Borges

42. Living, Thinking, Looking — Siri Hustvedt

43. Loitering — Charles D’Ambrosio

44. Lunch With a Bigot — Amitava Kumar

45. Madness, Rack, and Honey — Mary Ruefle

46. Magic Hours — Tom Bissell

47. Meatless Days — Sara Suleri

48. Meaty — Samantha Irby

49. Meditations from a Movable Chair — Andre Dubus

50. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood — Mary McCarthy

51. Me Talk Pretty One Day — David Sedaris

52. Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal — Wendy S. Walters

53. My 1980s and Other Essays — Wayne Koestenbaum

54. The Next American Essay, The Lost Origins of the Essay, and The Making of the American Essay — anthologies, edited by John D’Agata

55. The Norton Book of Personal Essays — anthology, edited by Joseph Epstein

56. Notes from No Man’s Land — Eula Biss

57. Notes of a Native Son — James Baldwin

58. Not That Kind of Girl — Lena Dunham

59. On Beauty and Being Just — Elaine Scarry

60. Once I Was Cool — Megan Stielstra

61. 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write — Sarah Ruhl

62. On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored — Adam Phillips

63. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence — Adrienne Rich

64. The Opposite of Loneliness — Marina Keegan

65. Otherwise Known as the Human Condition — Geoff Dyer

66. Paris to the Moon — Adam Gopnik

67. Passions of the Mind — A.S. Byatt

68. The Pillow Book — Sei Shonagon

69. A Place to Live — Natalia Ginzburg

70. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination — Toni Morrison

71. Pulphead — John Jeremiah Sullivan

72. Selected Essays — Michel de Montaigne

73. Shadow and Act — Ralph Ellison

74. Sidewalks — Valeria Luiselli

75. Sister Outsider — Audre Lorde

76. The Size of Thoughts — Nicholson Baker

77. Slouching Towards Bethlehem — Joan Didion

78. The Souls of Black Folk — W. E. B. Du Bois

79. The Story About the Story — anthology, edited by J.C. Hallman

80. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again — David Foster Wallace

81. Ten Years in the Tub — Nick Hornby

82. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man — Henry Louis Gates

83. This Is Running for Your Life — Michelle Orange

84. This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage — Ann Patchett

85. Tiny Beautiful Things — Cheryl Strayed

86. Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American Culture — Gerald Early

87. Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints — Joan Acocella

88. The Unspeakable — Meghan Daum

89. Vermeer in Bosnia — Lawrence Weschler

90. The Wave in the Mind — Ursula K. Le Guin

91. We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think — Shirley Hazzard

92. We Should All Be Feminists — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi

93. What Are People For? — Wendell Berry

94. When I Was a Child I Read Books — Marilynne Robinson

95. The White Album — Joan Didion

96. White Girls — Hilton Als

97. The Woman Warrior — Maxine Hong Kinston

98. The Writing Life — Annie Dillard

99. Writing With Intent — Margaret Atwood

100. You Don’t Have to Like Me — Alida Nugent

If you have a favorite essay collection I’ve missed here, let me know in the comments!

The Most Read Books on Goodreads This Week

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How to Write Dazzlingly Brilliant Essays: Sharp Advice for Ambitious Students

Rachel McCombie, a graduate of St John’s College, Oxford, shares actionable tips on taking your essays from “Good” to “Outstanding.”

For ambitious students, essays are a chance to showcase academic flair, demonstrate original thinking and impress with advanced written English skills.

The best students relish the challenge of writing essays because they’re a chance to exercise academic research skills and construct interesting arguments. Essays allow you to demonstrate your knowledge, understanding and intelligence in a creative and relatively unrestricted way – provided you keep within the word count! But when lots of other people are answering the same essay question as you, how do you make yours stand out from the crowd? In this article, we’re going to show you the secret of writing a truly brilliant essay.

What are essays actually for?

Before we get into the nitty gritty of how to write an outstanding essay, we need to go right back to basics and think about what essays are actually designed to test. Only by understanding the purpose of an essay can you really begin to understand what it is that tutors are looking for when they read your work. No matter what the academic level of the student is, essays are designed to test many things: – Knowledge – fundamentally, essays test and help consolidate what you’ve read and learned, making them an important part of the learning process, particularly for humanities subjects. – Comprehension – they test your ability to make sense of and clearly explain complex concepts and issues. – They test your ability to understand the question and produce a considered response to it. – They evaluate your ability to absorb and condense information from a variety of sources , which will probably mean covering a lot of material in a short space of time; this necessitates appraisal of which bits of material are relevant and which are not. – They test your ability to write a balanced and coherent argument that considers a number of points of view. – They showcase your level of written English skills. – They even put your time management to the test – essays are a part of your workload that must be planned, prioritised and delivered to a high standard, to deadline.

Characteristics of the perfect essay

Now that we know why we’re asked to write essays, what are the characteristics that define the essays that impress? The tutors marking your essays may have their own preferences and things they look for in outstanding essays, but let’s take a look at a few of the irrefutable traits of the best.

Original thinking

The hallmark of the truly brilliant essay is original thinking. That doesn’t have to mean coming up with an entirely new theory; most of, if not all, the topics you’ll be studying at GCSE , A-level or even undergraduate level have been thought about in so much depth and by so many people that virtually every possible angle will have been thought of already. But what it does mean is that the essay stands out from those of other students in that it goes beyond the obvious and takes an original approach – perhaps approaching the topic from a different angle, coming up with a different hypothesis from what you’ve been discussing in class, or introducing new evidence and intelligent insights from material not included on the reading list.

Solid, in-depth knowledge and understanding

It goes without saying that the brilliant essay should demonstrate a strong knowledge of the facts, and not just knowledge but sound comprehension of the concepts or issues being discussed and why they matter. The perfect essay demonstrates an ability to deploy relevant facts and use them to form the basis of an argument or hypothesis. It covers a wide range of material and considers every point of view, confidently making use of and quoting from a variety of sources.

Clear structure with intelligent debate

The perfect essay provides a coherent discussion of both sides of the story, developing a balanced argument throughout, and with a conclusion that weighs up the evidence you’ve covered and perhaps provides your own intelligent opinion on how the topic should be interpreted based on the evidence covered.

No superfluous information

Everything written in the perfect essay serves a purpose – to inform and persuade. There’s no rambling or going off at tangents – it sticks to the point and doesn’t waste the reader’s time. This goes back to our earlier point about sorting the relevant facts from the irrelevant material; including material that isn’t relevant shows that you’ve not quite grasped the real heart of the matter.

Exceptional English

The words in the perfect essay flow effortlessly, and the reader feels in safe hands. Sentences need never be read more than once to be understood, and each follows logically on from the next, with no random jumping about from topic to topic from one paragraph to the next. Spelling and grammar are flawless, with no careless typos. So how do you go about writing this mythical Perfect Essay? Read on to find out!

Put in extra background work

Committed students always read beyond what the reading list tells them to read. Guaranteed to impress, wide reading gives you deeper knowledge than your peers and gives you the extra knowledge and insights you need to make your essay stand out. If you’re studying English, for example, don’t just read the set text! Here are some ideas to widen your reading and give you a good range of impressive quotes to include in your essay: – Other works by the same author – how do they compare with your set text? – Works by contemporary authors – does your set text fit into a wider movement, or is it very different from what was being written at the time? – Works by the author’s predecessors – what works inspired the author of your set text? How do you see them shining through in the text you’re studying, and how have they been developed? – Literary criticism – gauge the range of opinions about your set text by reading what the literary critics have to say. Whose opinion do you most agree with, and why? – Background history – so that you can appreciate and refer to the context in which the author was writing (we’ll come back to this last point a little later). It sounds like a lot of extra work, but you don’t necessarily have to read everything in full. It’s fine to dip into these other resources providing you don’t inadvertently take points out of context.

Know what you want to say before you start writing

You’re probably sick of hearing this particular piece of advice, but it’s important to start out with a clear idea in your mind of what you want to say in your essay and how you will structure your arguments. The easiest way to do this is to write an essay plan. This needn’t be a big deal, or time-consuming; all you need to do is to open a new document on your computer, type out the ideas you want to cover and drag and drop them into a logical order. From there, you simply start typing your essay directly into the plan itself. Your essay should include an introduction, a series of paragraphs that develop an argument rather than just jumping from topic to topic, and a conclusion that weighs up the evidence.

Answer the question you’ve been set, not the question you want to answer

A common problem with students’ responses to essays is that rather than answering the question they’ve been set , they try to mould the question to what they’d prefer to write about, because that’s what they feel most comfortable with. Be very careful not to do this! You could end up writing a brilliant essay, but if didn’t actually answer the question then it’s not going to be well received by the person marking it.

Give a balanced argument…

Good essays give both sides of an argument, presenting information impartially and considering multiple points of view. One-sided arguments won’t impress, as you need to show that you’ve thought about the evidence comprehensively.

…but your opinion and interpretation matter too

Show that you’ve made your own mind up based on your weighing up of the evidence. This shows that you’re not just hiding behind what other people say about the topic, but that you’ve had the independence of mind to form your own intelligent opinion about it.

Quote liberally

Use quotations from academic works and sources to back up points you want to make. Doing so strengthens your argument by providing evidence for your statements, as well as demonstrating that you’ve read widely around your subject. However, don’t go too far and write an essay that’s essentially just a list of what other people say about the subject. Quoting too much suggests that you don’t have the confidence or knowledge to explain things in your own words, so have to hide behind those of other people. Make your own mind up about what you’re writing about – as already mentioned, it’s fine to state your own opinion if you’ve considered the arguments and presented the evidence.

Context matters

As we’ve already touched on, if you can demonstrate knowledge of the context of the subject you’re writing about, this will show that you’ve considered possible historical influences that may have shaped a work or issue. This shows that you haven’t simply taken the essay question at face value and demonstrates your ability to think beyond the obvious. An ability to look at the wider picture marks you out as an exceptional student, as many people can’t see the wood for the trees and have a very narrow focus when it comes to writing essays. If you’re an English student, for instance, an author’s work should be considered not in isolation but in the context of the historical events and thinking that helped define the period in which the author was writing. You can’t write about Blake’s poetry without some knowledge and discussion of background events such as the Industrial Revolution, and the development of the Romantic movement as a whole.

Include images and diagrams

You know what they say – a picture speaks a thousand words. What matters in an essay is effective and persuasive communication, and if a picture or diagram will help support a point you’re making, include it. As well as helping to communicate, visuals also make your essay more enjoyable to read for the person marking it – and if they enjoy reading it, the chances are you’ll get better marks! Don’t forget to ensure that you include credits for any images and diagrams you include.

Use full academic citations and a bibliography

Show you mean business by including a full set of academic citations, with a bibliography at the end, even if you haven’t been told to. The great thing about this is that it not only makes you look organised and scholarly, but it also gives you the opportunity to show off just how many extra texts you’ve studied to produce your masterpiece of an essay! Make use of the footnote feature in your word processor and include citations at the bottom of each page, with a main bibliography at the end of the essay. There are different accepted forms for citing an academic reference, but the main thing to remember is to pick one format and be consistent. Typically the citation will include the title and author of the work, the date of publication and the page number(s) of the point or quotation you’re referring to. Here’s an example: 1. Curta, F. (2007) – “Some remarks on ethnicity in medieval archaeology” in Early Medieval Europe 15 (2), pp. 159-185

Before you ask, no, a spell check isn’t good enough! How many times have you typed “form” instead of “from”? That’s just one of a huge number of errors that spell check would simply miss. Your English should be impeccable if you want to be taken seriously, and that means clear and intelligent sentence structures, no misplaced apostrophes, no typos and no grammar crimes. Include your name at the top of each page of your essay, and number the pages. Also, make sure you use a font that’s easy to read, such as Times New Roman or Arial. The person marking your essay won’t appreciate having to struggle through reading a fancy Gothic font, even if it does happen to match the Gothic literature you’re studying!

Meet the deadline

You don’t need us to tell you that, but for the sake of being comprehensive, we’re including it anyway. You could write the best essay ever, but if you deliver it late, it won’t be looked upon favourably! Don’t leave writing your essay until the last minute – start writing with plenty of time to spare, and ideally leave time to sleep on it before you submit it. Allowing time for it to sink in may result in you having a sudden brilliant revelation that you want to include. So there we have it – everything you need to know in order to write an essay to impress. If you want to get ahead, you might also want to think about attending an English summer school .

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10 of the Greatest Essays on Writing Ever Written

If there’s one topic that writers can be counted on to tackle at least once in their working lives, it’s writing itself. A good thing too, especially for all those aspiring writers out there looking for a little bit of guidance. For some winter inspiration and honing of your craft, here you’ll find ten great essays on writing, from the classic to the contemporary, from the specific to the all-encompassing. Note: there are many, many, many great essays on writing. Bias has been extended here to personal favorites and those available to read online. Also of note but not included: full books on the subject like Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird , Stephen King’s On Writing , and Ron Carlson’s Ron Carlson Writes a Story , or, in a somewhat different sense, David Shields’ Reality Hunger , for those looking for a longer commitment. Read on, and add your own favorite essays on writing to the list in the comments.

“Not-Knowing,” Donald Barthelme, from Not Knowing: the Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme . Read it here .

In which Barthelme, a personal favorite and king of strange and wonderful stories, muses on not-knowing, style, our ability to “quarrel with the world, constructively,” messiness, Mallarmé, and a thief named Zeno passed out wearing a chastity belt.

“The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.”

“Fairy Tale Is Form, Form Is Fairy Tale,” Kate Bernheimer, from The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays From Tin House . Read it here .

Bernheimer is a constant champion of the fairy tale and its influence on literature at large (not least as editor of The Fairy Tale Review ), and a writer we couldn’t do without. This essay unpacks the formal elements of fairy tales, and does a fair bit more than hint at their essentialness to writers of all kinds.

“Fairy tales hold a key to the door fiercely locked between so-called realism and nonrealism, convention and experimentalism, psychology and abstraction. A key for those who see these as binaries, that is… Every writer is like a topsy- turvy doll that on one side is Red Riding Hood and on the other side the Wolf, or on the one side is a Boy and on the other, a Raven and Coffin. The traditional techniques of fairy tales—identifiable, named—are reborn in the different ways we all tell stories.”

“Reflections on Writing,” Henry Miller, from The Wisdom of the Heart . Read a few excerpts here .

A characteristically wonderful exploration of Miller’s own emotional, psychological, and technical struggles with writing.

“I had to grow foul with knowledge, realize the futility of everything; smash everything, grow desperate, then humble, then sponge myself off the slate, as it were, in order to recover my authenticity. I had to arrive at the brink and then take a leap in the dark.”

“The Figure a Poem Makes,” Robert Frost, from Collected Poems . Read it here .

A gorgeous mini-essay from an American giant that is equally relevant to writers of poetry or prose, and is almost a poem itself.

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.”

“On Style,” Susan Sontag, from Against Interpretation . Read it here .

As much about criticism as it is about writing (and perhaps more), Sontag dissects style versus form versus content versus the conceptions of all these things that we have in our heads.

“In other words, what is inevitable in a work of art is the style. To the extent that a work seems right, just, unimaginable otherwise (without loss or damage) , what we are responding to is a quality of its style. The most attractive works of art are those which give us the illusion that the artist had no alternatives, so wholly centered is he in his style. Compare that which is forced, labored, synthetic in the construction of Madame Bovary and of Ulysses with the ease and harmony of such equally ambitious works as Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Kafka’s Metamorphosis . The first two books I have mentioned are great indeed. But the greatest art seems secreted, not constructed.”

“Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot, from The Sacred Wood . Read it here .

Whether or not you subscribe to Eliot’s “impersonal theory” of poetry, or his conception of the artist’s inevitable “self-sacrifice” to the past, there’s no arguing that this essay is a barn-burner.

“If you compare several representative passages of the greatest poetry you see how great is the variety of types of combination, and also how completely any semi-ethical criterion of “sublimity” misses the mark. For it is not the “greatness,” the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts.”

“The Ecstasy of Influence,” Jonathan Lethem, from The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, etc. . Read it here .

Here, Lethem discusses not just the shifty concept of plagiarism in fiction, but the anxiety of appropriating pop culture, copyright, Disney, the power of a gift economy, the idea of a “commons of cultural materials,” art of all forms. A must-read for any contemporary creator, especially if you’ve ever nicked a line from a favorite book.

“Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one’s voice isn’t just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.”

“How to Write with Style,” Kurt Vonnegut, from How to Use the Power of the Written Word . Read it here .

Vonnegut is an enduring treasure trove of literary advice — everyone you know has seen this excellent video of the man explaining the shapes of stories — and this little essay is no different: clever, whip-smart, and told with joy.

“Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your reader will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an ego maniac or a chowderhead — or, worse, they will stop reading you.”

“Why I Write,” George Orwell. Read it here .

It’s hard to put together a list of great essays without including something from Orwell. So why not this one, forever quoted by anyone who has ever tried to write a novel, or wanted to?

“All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.”

“On Keeping a Notebook,” Joan Didion, from Slouching Towards Bethlehem . Read it here .

But of course: the essay that has launched a thousand notebook-keepers.

“Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”

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The machine always wins by richard seymour, my instagram by dayna tortorici, why the past 10 years of american life have been uniquely stupid by jonathan haidt, 15 more articles about social media, m by john sack, blackhawk down by mark bowden, hiroshima by john hersey, the ai-powered, totally autonomous future of war is here by will knight, 35 more great articles about war, the hinge of history by joan didion, how america lost its mind by kurt andersen, the problem with facts by tim harford, constant anxiety won't save the world by julie beck, 75 more great articles about politics, crime & punishment, the caging of america by adam gopnik, the crooked ladder by malcolm gladwell, cruel and unusual punishment by matt taibbi, 20 more great articles about crime, the body in room 348 by mark bowden, the art of the steal by joshua bearman, true crime by david grann, the crypto trap by andy greenberg, 35 more great true crime stories, does it help to know history by adam gopnik, 1491 by charles c. mann, a history of violence by steven pinker, the worst mistake in history by j. diamond, 25 more great articles about history, notes of a native son by james baldwin, how to slowly kill yourself and others in america by kiese laymon, magic actions by tobi haslett, 30 more great essays about race, cities and ambition by paul graham, here is new york by e. b. white, 25 more great articles about cities, we are all confident idiots by david dunning, fantastic beasts and how to rank them by kathryn schulz, the problem with p-values by david colquhoun, what is the monkeysphere by david wong, 100 more great psychology articles, love & relationships, love by lauren slater, masters of love by emily esfahani smith, this is emo by chuck klosterman, 50 more great articles about relationships, what makes us happy by joshua shenk, social connection makes a better brain by emily esfahani smith, the real roots of midlife crisis by jonathan rauch, 20 more great articles about happiness, success & failure, you can do it, baby by leslie garrett, what drives success by amy chua and jed rubenfeld, the fringe benefits of failure, and the importance of imagination by j.k. rowling, 10 more great articles about success, health & medicine, somewhere worse by jia tolentino, race to the vaccine by david heath and gus garcia-roberts, an epidemic of fear by amy wallace the score by atul gawande, 50 more great articles about health, mental health, darkness visible by william styron, the epidemic of mental illness by marcia angell, surviving anxiety by scott stossel, 50 more great articles about mental health, the moral instinct by steven pinker, not nothing by stephen cave, the greatest good by derek thompson, 15 more great articles about ethics, getting in by malcolm gladwell, learning by degrees by rebecca mead, the end of the english major by nathan heller, 20 more great articles about education, the string theory by david foster wallace, the istanbul derby by spencer hall, the kentucky derby is decadent and depraved by hunter s. thompson, 50 more great sports articles, why does music make us feel good by philip ball, one more time by elizabeth margulis, how to be a rock critic by lester bangs, 50 more great music articles, the arts & culture, inhaling the spore by lawrence weschler, death by harry potter by chuck klosterman, a one-man art market by bryan aappleyard, welcome to airspace by kyle chayka, 35 more great articles about the arts, fx porn by david foster wallace, flick chicks by mindy kaling, the movie set that ate itself by michael idov, 15 more great articles about movies, the last meal by michael paterniti, if you knew sushi by nick tosches, consider the lobster by david foster wallace, 50 more great articles about food.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

The last american hero is junior johnson. yes by tom wolfe, masters of the universe go to camp by philip weiss, what is glitter by caity weaver.

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10 Examples of Great College Essays (With Links)

Preparing an outstanding college admission essay is no small task.

The ticket to your dream college can be a piece of paper – your college essay. Picture yourself walking the halls of your ideal school, surrounded by opportunities and a bright future. Want to ensure your essay stands out? Dive into this guide. Beyond grades and test scores, the college decision process is influenced by recommendations, achievements, and extracurriculars. However, your college essay can be the ace up your sleeve. Explore the best essays of all time , and delve into how to craft your own . This list spotlights exemplary essays that unlocked the doors of top institutions. Discover what makes them shine, and let them guide your narrative. Need even more insights? Consider College Essay Essentials , a comprehensive resource packed with 24 standout essays.

10 Best Examples Of College Essays:

1. four examples of standout college application essays (2017 edition).

These essays were selected by the editorial reviewers from the NY Times (so they have to be good, right?). The topic here is work, money, and class.

2. Five Examples of College Application Essays (2018 edition)

Once again, the team from the NY Times selected the best college admission essays from high school students. Out of over 300 submitted pieces of work, only these five were ultimately cut. Read them and see why.

3. 147 College Essays That Worked

The essays from this list are not your usual literary masterpieces, but they did the job and allowed students to get access to some great universities such as UC Berkeley, Stanford, or Harvard. Read just a couple of them to fill your inspiration tank.

4. Eight Exceptional Essays From The Hamilton College

Here you can find some nice examples of eight essays of successful applicants to Hamilton College. They were selected by Hamilton Alumni Review Magazine and showcased with the permission of students from various backgrounds.

5. A Single Sample College Application Essay (With Critique)

This essay was written by an anonymous writer. You must read it, however, because there’s a nice commentary that describes the strengths and weaknesses of the work. The critique is broken down into four parts – introduction, body, conclusion, and the overall score. Look at your essay in that way and make sure it has all the right ingredients. And here’s another example like this with additional comments.

6. Numerous Essays That Worked at the Johns Hopkins University

Every year, the admissions committee selects some of the best and most creative essays that allow students to get enrolled in the university. As stated on the page, the most important thing about creating your statement is originality and the ability to share your own story uniquely. Demonstrating your precocious thought process matters the most. The best thing about these lists is that below each essay, you can find the actual comments from the admission committee. For example: We liked Stephen’s essay because it catches your attention right away and continues to show critical thinking, initiative, and problem-solving. His personality comes through as he naturally conveys humor. Through his anecdotes from growing up, we got a sense of how he might approach his studies here at Hopkins.”

7. Essays That Worked At Tufts University

Here’s another edition of examples that ultimately helped to enroll the students in the University. This list is great because it comes with videos, where the members of the admissions committee discuss different aspects of each essay and what made them so great.

8. Three Examples of Top College Essays

Writing a college essay may seem like a scary task, especially if you still don’t know where are you going to apply. You need to check some examples of inventive statements just to get a feel of what is expected. Then you can make up your mind and base your work on your unique circumstances.

9. An Essay Which Got The Student Into 14 Colleges (including Harvard and Princeton)

This is one of the most successful essays of all time. Why? Because it grips you from the very first sentence and tells a true story of sorrow and pain. Talking about your deep emotions and painful memories is never easy, but it can make a huge impression on the readers. You can find the full profile of the students who wrote it here (along with their other achievements and profiles of other successful students). And here you can find six more essays that got students into Harvard.

10. Bonus: Notes From Top College Officials About What Makes A Successful Application Essay

This is not an example, but it’s still worth a read, as it will enable you to see essays from the admission officer’s perspective. Follow their suggestions and you can’t go wrong. I hope you enjoyed this list and that you’ve gained some valuable information from it. Applying for college and writing your essay is always stressful but hopefully, now you’re prepared. Please let me know about your struggles in the comments section below.

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17 Personal Essays That Will Change Your Life

Think essays are just something boring you write for class? These masterpieces will make you totally reconsider.

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1. "Goodbye To All That" – Joan Didion

The final piece in one of her two most beloved collections, Slouching Towards Bethlehem , this essay contains everything there is to love about Didion — her sharp eye, her unbelievable concision, her expression of emotions that are real and contradictory. It follows her arrival in New York and her departure eight years later, and in so doing discusses the city and youth — and the romantic lies that both are. She writes: "... I was in love with New York. I do not mean 'love' in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again."

2. "Mr. Lytle, an Essay" – John Jeremiah Sullivan

Sullivan has become one of the most talked about magazine writers of the last few years. This piece, which you can read online at the Paris Review , and was collected in his highly recommended book, Pulphead , is one of his best. It discusses, with such grace, being mentored in his twenties by once-famous Southern Renaissance writer Andrew Lytle. It's a meditation on art and futility, the Old South, and the sheer strangeness that can be relationships between men.

3. "Once More to the Lake" – E.B. White

Recognized for his children's literature (including Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web ) and popularizing Strunk's The Elements of Style , White was also an accomplished essayist. "Once More to the Lake" follows White and his son to Maine, where they spend a week along the same lake White visited with his father as a boy. It is one of the most moving reflections upon fatherhood, summertime, America, and mortality ever crafted. You can find it in many anthologies and in The Collected Essays of E.B. White .

4. "Ticket to the Fair" – David Foster Wallace

Those who knock Wallace for his verbosity — or associate him merely with a liberal use of footnotes — haven't read one of his classic essays through to the end. This one, which you can read online at Harper's or in his collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again , follows him home to Illinois, specifically to the state fair there. Laugh-out-loud hilarious and almost ridiculous in its level of detail, it explores the author's fractured identity, the Midwest versus the East Coast, and the American experience at large.

5. "A Few Words About Breasts" – Nora Ephron

Published in Esquire in 1975, this is the best-known essay by the late, great screenwriter and essayist. While she renders the experience of being flat-chested in the '50s with incredible humor and pathos, it is the essay's ending — the shock of it — that makes this unforgettable.

6. "Self-Reliance" — Ralph Waldo Emerson

One of Emerson's most influential essays, you can read it online or in nearly every collection of his works. While his prose's formality may be a shock at first, what he says he says with great clarity and to the great empowerment of his reader. It is a declaration of the fact that true happiness, in oneself and all relationships, must spurn from self-love and honest expression: "I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should."

7. "Here Is a Lesson in Creative Writing" – Kurt Vonnegut

Though it's collected in his great and final collection of essays, Man Without a Country , you can read an adaptation online at Lapham's Quarterly . While it's a must-read for aspiring creative writers, it's about more than writing — much, much more — despite its brevity and characteristic Vonnegut wit. It opens with the best slam of the semicolon ever.

8. "Notes of a Native Son" – James Baldwin

The titular essay from this collection — which honestly you should just read — is an ambitious and candid discussion of the passing of his father during a time of great racial turmoil. It opens: "On the twenty-ninth of July, in 1943, my father died. On the same day, a few hours later, his last child was born. Over a month before this, while all our energies were concentrated in waiting for these events, there had been, in Detroit, one of the bloodiest race riots of the century. A few hours after my father's funeral, while he lay in state in the undertaker's chapel, a race riot broke out in Harlem. In the morning of the third of August, we drove my father through the graveyard through a wilderness of smashed glass."

9. "The Invisible Made Visible" – David Rakoff

David Rakoff died a little over a year ago at the too-early age of 47. Just a few months prior, he read this essay about his cancer, his imminent death, and dancing, aloud as part of This American Life 's live show. As always with Rakoff's work, it was funny, painful, and revealed the author's intense love of the English language. Warning: When you watch this video , you will laugh audibly, several times, and you might cry.

10. "The Death of a Moth" – Virginia Woolf

The briefest — and perhaps densest — essay on this list, "The Death of the Moth," on its face, is about exactly that: Woolf notices a moth caught in her window and witnesses its death. Read it online and then read it again, and again.

11. "Total Eclipse " – Annie Dillard

This much-anthologized meditation follows Dillard and her husband as they drive to a mountaintop in Washington to witness a total eclipse — that rare event when the sun becomes entirely obscured, turning day briefly into night. Dillard's rendering of this experience showcases her enviable abilities to both observe and describe. It's collected in Teaching a Stone to Talk .

12. "Sliver of Sky" – Barry Lopez

Well-known nature writer Barry Lopez shocked many when he published this essay in January, in which he confessed being raped throughout his adolescence by his mother's sometime boyfriend. It is an affecting and horrifying portrait of what it is to be a victim of sexual abuse. Unfortunately you do have to be a Harper's subscriber to read it (for now).

13. "Shooting an Elephant" — George Orwell

Prior to penning 1984 and Animal Farm , Orwell was posted as a policeman in Burma, where he once had to shoot a rampaging elephant. The resultant essay, published in 1936, is a condemnation of imperialism — and his own selfish desire to not be implicated by it. Read it online or find it in the collection of the same title .

14. "Shipping Out" — David Foster Wallace

Yes, Wallace deserves two on this list. Also collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and originally published in Harper's , this is another travelogue turned existential rumination that shows unabashedly and hilariously the horrors of society (this time via a cruise ship) and really says more about the author himself.

15. "The Braindead Megaphone" – George Saunders

Saunders is more famous for his fiction (like many of the folks on this list) but that doesn't mean his essays are not fantastic. The first in the eponymous collection , "The Braindead Megaphone" takes on the current political and media climate in America that will make you shake your head in a I've-always-thought-that-but-never-really-put-it-that-way-myself way.

16. "We Do Abortions Here" — Sallie Tisdale

Tisdale was a nurse at an abortion clinic when she published this essay in 1987. She writes honestly and movingly about something she knows few want to think let alone read about. "There is a numbing sameness lurking in this job," she says, "the same questions, the same answers, even the same trembling tone in the voices. The worst is the sameness of human failure, of inadequacy in the face of each day’s dull demands." Read it for free online .

17. "The White Album" — Joan Didion

Of course Didion also gets two on this list. If you have not read this classic, do so now. It tracks our culture's — and the author's — transition out of the cataclysmic era that was the late '60s into something else much darker. It also contains an unforgettable image of Jim Morrison wearing black vinyl pants. Find it in the collection of the same name.

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Make Lists, Not War

The meta-lists website, best essays of all time – chronological.

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 chronologically, by date of publication. For the same list organized by rank, that is, with the essays on the most lists at the top, 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.

11 th Century Sei Shonagon – Hateful Things (from The Pillow Book ) (1002) (on 2 lists)

14 th Century Yoshida Kenko – Essays in Idleness (1332) (on 2 lists)

16 th Century Michel de Montaigne – On Some Verses of Virgil (1580) (on 2 lists)

17 th Century Robert Burton – Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) (on 2 lists) John Milton – Areopagitica (1644) (on 2 lists)

18 th Century Jonathan Swift – A Modest Proposal (1729) (on 3 lists)

19 th Century William Hazlitt – On Going a Journey (1822) (on 2 lists) Charles Lamb – The Superannuated Man (1823) (on 2 lists) William Hazlitt – On the Pleasure of Hating (1823) (on 4 lists) Ralph Waldo Emerson – Self-Reliance (1841) (on 4 lists) Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience (1849) (on 2 lists) Henry David Thoreau – Where I Lived, and What I Lived For (from Walden ) (1854) (on 2 lists)Henry David Thoreau – Economy (from Walden ) (1854) (on 2 lists) Henry David Thoreau – Walking (1861) (on 2 lists) Robert Louis Stevenson – The Lantern-Bearers (1888) (on 2 lists)

20 th Century Zora Neale Hurston – How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928) (on 2 lists) Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own (1928) (on 4 lists) Virginia Woolf – Street Haunting: A London Adventure (1930) (on 3 lists) George Orwell – A Hanging (1931) (on 2 lists) Junichiro Tanizaki – In Praise of Shadows (1933) (on 2 lists) Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet (1935) (on 2 lists) George Orwell – Shooting an Elephant (1936) (on 6 lists) E.B. White – Once More to the Lake (1941) (on 6 lists) James Agee and Walker Evans – Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) (on 2 lists) Virginia Woolf – The Death of a Moth (1942) (on 4 lists) Simone Weil – On Human Personality (1943) (on 2 lists) M.F.K. Fisher – The Flaw (1943) (on 2 lists) Vladimir Nabokov – Speak, Memory (1951, revised 1966) (on 2 lists) George Orwell – Such, Such Were the Joys (1952) (on 4 lists) Mary McCarthy – Artists in Uniform: A Story (1953) (on 2 lists) James Baldwin – Notes of a Native Son (1955) (on 11 lists) E.B. White – Goodbye to Forty-Eighth Street (1957) (on 2 lists) Martin Luther King, Jr. – Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963) (on 2 lists) Joseph Mitchell – Joe Gould’s Secret (1964) (on 2 lists) Susan Sontag – Against Interpretation (1966) (on 2 lists) Joan Didion – Goodbye To All That (1968) (on 6 lists) Joan Didion – On Keeping A Notebook (1968) (on 5 lists) Joan Didion – In Bed (1968) (on 4 lists) Edward Hoagland – The Courage of Turtles (1970) (on 2 lists) John McPhee – The Search for Marvin Gardens (1972) (on 3 lists) Annie Dillard – Seeing (from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek ) (1974) (on 2 lists) Maxine Hong Kingston – No Name Woman (from The Woman Warrior ) (1976) (on 2 lists) Joan Didion – The White Album (1968-1978) (on 3 lists) Eudora Welty – The Little Store (1978) (on 3 lists) Annie Dillard – Total Eclipse (1982) (on 5 lists) Annie Dillard – Living Like Weasels (1982) (on 2 lists) Roland Barthes – Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1982) (on 2 lists) Gloria E. Anzaldúa – How to Tame a Wild Tongue (1987) (on 2 lists) Italo Calvino – Exactitude (1988) (on 2 lists) Phillip Lopate – Against Joie de Vivre (1989) (on 3 lists) Richard Rodriguez – Late Victorians (1990) (on 2 lists) Amy Tan – Mother Tongue (1991) (on 4 lists) Seymour Krim – To My Brothers & Sisters in the Failure Business (1991) (on 2 lists) David Wojnarowicz – Being Queer in America: A Journal of Disintegration (1991) (on 2 lists) Anne Carson – The Anthropology of Water (1995) (on 2 lists) Jo Ann Beard – The Fourth State of Matter (1996) (on 5 lists) David Foster Wallace – A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again (1996) (on 5 lists)

21 st Century Susan Sontag – Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) (on 2 lists) David Foster Wallace – Consider The Lobster (2005) (on 4 lists) Etel Adnan – In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005) (on 2 lists) Paul LaFarge – Destroy All Monsters (2006) (on 2 lists) Brian Doyle – Joyas Voladoras (2012) (on 2 lists)

Discover 10 Famous American Authors Who Changed Literature World

Literature as an art has many horizons; it includes books, articles, critical reviews, and essays. At school, teachers assign homework writing tasks. Essays by famous American writers aim to prepare students for the potential career challenges associated with writing. Famous American authors who have introduced world’s best novels accomplished popular essays. Some of them describe one’s life. Other famous American writers represent native history of that time. 19 th century was especially rich for the great essays.

A great essay can be more distinguished than a good novel. The most popular genres of essay include:

Non-fiction
Current events
Personal reflection
Instructive

It’s up to the young author to choose one to practice. If you want to master the art of writing, consider these popular American writers. Read at least several papers published by them to improve your knowledge.

The article offers the list of top-preferred essays written by popular American writers. Find authors from various background and historical periods. Keep in mind the qualities of essay: brief, concise, attention-grabbing, and interesting.

10 Famous American Authors Every Young Writer Should Recognize

James Baldwin

The first man to recall is James Baldwin. Born in 1924, the boy grew up with his stepfather who was an exemplar priest. Baldwin grew up with 8 children; he has never known anything about his dad, so his pain is felt in such pieces as “Tell me when the train left” or “Giovanni’s Room.” His literary career started in Greenwich Village. That place needed his hero who could cheer up the local population living in poverty.

Most of Baldwin’s texts oppose relevant for that time racism, explaining people must be all equal. Regular attacks force the famous artist to transfer to France.

Best essays of all time include several popular works of author:

“Notes of a Native Son”
“The Evidence of Things Not Seen”
“The Price of the Ticket”
Scott Fitzgerald

Scoot F. Fitzgerald, born in 1896, is famous US short story writer and novelist. He best illustrates the Jazz Age; Fitzgerald is a dedicated, honored member of “Lost Generation” (1920s). 164 essays out of 4 collections of short stories were published in popular American magazines during his lifetime.

Fitzgerald was an optimistic person who described the inspiration and excesses of his age. Fitzgerald is the author of popular “The Great Gatsby,” which was remastered and filmed two times. Other famous author’s works are:

“This Side of Paradise”
“The Beautiful and the Damned”
Norman Mailer

The citizen of New Jersey from the Jewish family managed to create several masterpieces. American artist Normal Mailer finished Harvard; this university made him love literature. At the age of 18, he started his writer’s career. Harvard rewarded the famous author with corresponding appreciation.

The best essays of Mailer include:

“The Presidential Papers”
“Pieces and Pontifications” (dedicated to Little Boston’s Life)

Find the best writing ideas by clicking on this link.

Joan Didion

Female author Joan Didion is still available: she came from California and started to write her opening essays at the age of five. While her parents spend entire days at work, the little girl tried to read all possible books found in their apartment. Her Bachelor Degree (Arts and English language) helped her passion. She is among the famous essay writers of the 20 th century as Didion predetermined modern culture by working in “Vogue” magazine. The popular author’s works involve:

“Salvador.”
“ After Henry ” (dedicated to Earth)
Ernest Hemingway

Among all writers in US history, Hemingway was the true master of word; he introduced the shortest essays/stories made of six words! This popular American genius developed his distinctive style which is still copied by modern artists. Every essay he wrote was simple to read. He avoided introducing new topics or using complex words; you can see it from his most famous essays:

“The Garden of Eden”
“In Our Time”
“The Sun Also Rises”
“The Old Man and the Sea”
Robert Atwan

Another famous writer is Robert Atwan. He was born in 1940; he comes from New Jersey. Two popular universities, Seton Hall and Rutgers, had this literature enthusiast among the top century students. American writer was focused on creating short stories during his lifetime:

“Great Moments in Literary Baseball” (you can guess what his favorite game is)
“Poems and Essays” (describing the seasons)
Stephen King

This century knows Stephen King as the best American horror book author. He has famous essays among his literary works too: his popular essays belong to the categories: supernatural fiction, suspense, and fantasy. These pieces of literature focus on Maine State. Great pieces he wrote include:

“Head Down”
“Great Hookers I Have Known”
David Foster Wallace

A famous American was born in 1968. His passion for philosophy turned into the love of literature; the author earned a degree in English language and literature. David Foster Wallace used literature as the tool to cure of regular depressions. Wallace died of the prescribed medicine, but he managed to share his best works with society:

“Television and U.S. Fiction” (funny story)
“A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again” and “Consider the Lobster.”
John McPhee

Famous American writers of 20 th century have John McPhee on the list. He is the pioneer of creative nonfiction; he won a Pulitzer Prize in his genre. Famous American author offered outstanding hook sentences which helped to grab target reader’s attention easily. He was teaching Journalism at Princeton University, sharing his best essays.

“Progression: How and What?”
“ The Search for Marvin Gardens”
Susan Sontag

Famous American authors list includes Susan Sontag, a popular female writer from New York City. The girl had imaginary friends from books and famous American novels when she was young. The author successfully passed necessary exams to enter Harvard University where she learned English literature to obtain a Master of Philosophy. In Oxford, famous female faced serious gender concerns and challenged related issues in her initial essays. She moved to Paris to release the rest of her works being pressed in America.

“Against Interpretation”
“Regarding the Pain of Others Styles of Radical Will”

Once you read the suggested literature, you will have a clue of how a short story/essay must look! If you are interested in how to write short essay , read one more blog. If you wish to get a great custom piece, buy essay writing online with time-tested academic team!

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A Close Reading of the Best Opening Paragraph of All Time

From shirley jackson's we have always lived in the castle , of course.

One hundred and one years ago today, Shirley Jackson was born. During her lifetime, she wrote “The Lottery,” and The Haunting of Hill House , and We Have Always Lived in the Castle , the latter of which features what I consider to be the best first paragraph of all time, or at least of any novel that I have ever read. Here it is:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides , the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

It almost seems like overkill to explain why this paragraph is so wonderful. It either strikes you or it doesn’t. You must have a certain sensibility to truly appreciate its charms. The rhythm is key. But let’s make an attempt, shall we?

It begins straightforwardly, with our narrator’s name—a somewhat old-fashioned way of opening a book, appropriate for our somewhat old-fashioned, or at least sheltered, perhaps even stunted, narrator. And what a name it is—a somewhat old-fashioned name, Mary Katherine Blackwood, evocative of witch trials and cultists, dense trees in far-away continents and Nancy Drew mysteries ( The Ghost of Blackwood Hall was published 14 years prior to We Have Always Lived in the Castle ). She tells us she is eighteen, but by the very next sentence, she already sounds younger, and she sounds younger still by the third (“I dislike washing myself” is a prim schoolgirl’s complaint—well, prim in tone if not in meaning). This too presages what will we come to discover about Merricat (for that is what she is most often called), who lives by a logic quite disconnected from that of the the adult world, i.e. the world of men, the world exterior to her cherished sororal bond, and who will aggressively reject all encroachments by same.

The real delight, for me, begins in that third sentence, which wiggles beautifully. First, we learn that Merricat wishes she were a werewolf, and so we know that she is a girl who wants magic, but a particular kind of magic—feral, earthy—and also power, and also transcendence. But it’s not only that she wishes she were a werewolf, but that with any luck at all the fact that two of her fingers are the same length would have made her one, but it hasn’t. She considers herself unlucky. She realizes that magic exists, but in this case it has passed her by. The perfect surreality of her matter-of-fact association—the length of her fingers to her potential as a werewolf—signals that Merricat is a magical thinker, and a confident one. We are entering a different world, Jackson is telling us, and it is definitively Merricat’s world. Submit to her logic or give up now. The third clause in that wiggly third sentence, I have had to be content with what I had , is almost ominous on second read—considering what exactly she’s done with what she has—but the prim stiff-upper-lipness of it is so fantastic. She is talking about not being a werewolf, remember. We all must make do with that particular shortcoming.

Next, two lists—who doesn’t love a good list?—of likes and dislikes, much like a child keeping track of her own opinions in her journal. The dislikes are slightly discordant. I would assume that a girl who dislikes washing herself would rather go in for dogs and noise, but Merricat is not simply an overgrown, magic-practicing tomboy; she is also a member of a family almost entirely cut off from society. Dogs and noise mean townspeople, and the townspeople do not care for the Blackwoods, or at least the Blackwoods who are left.

As for her likes: first we get a second pointed mention of Constance in twice as many lines, which should alert us to her importance. Richard Plantagenet, second on her list of likes, is rather more obscure. She could be referring to a number of people , including Richard the Lionheart, but she probably means the third Duke of York, whose claim to the throne (then-occupied by a weak and mentally ill Henry VI) was a primary cause of the Wars of the Roses. In 1460, the English Parliament compromised and declared that Richard would succeed to the throne after Henry VI’s death, but he was killed in battle by the Lancaster forces, and his son wound up becoming king instead. The mnemonic “Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain” is used to remember the order of the colors in the rainbow. So at any rate, now we know we’re dealing with a teenage girl bizarre and erudite enough to name a member of an ancient English dynasty, killed before he could achieve the goal he’d fought his whole life for, as one of her three favorite things.

The third favorite thing, of course, is a poisonous mushroom. This should set off certain alarm bells, especially when it is immediately followed by the revelation that everyone in her family is dead. I also count this revelation as a third mention of Constance.

It is coercive, this first paragraph. I find it impossible not to go on reading after reaching the end of it, yes, even now, when I am supposed to be writing this close reading for Literary Hub. One of my best writing teachers used to ask her class, after finishing a novel, to go back and read the first paragraph for the ways in which it predicted the rest of the text, or in the most skillful cases, taught us to read it. This paragraph is brilliant because of Merricat’s voice, and so is the rest of the book. It immediately teaches us who she is, and what this book is going to be like. That is, it gives us, in a few scant lines, a strong impression of an unusual character, and also presents all of the major themes of the novel: isolation, protective interiority, obscurity, loyalty (at least to Constance—who rings like a bell in Merricat’s mind), natural magic, poison, death, mystery. It plunges us immediately into the world that will occupy us for the next 150-odd pages, and also, in retrospect, pretty much gives away the ending. You’d think that wouldn’t necessarily be a quality of a good opening paragraph, but turns out not everything that makes this opening paragraph good can be close-read. Some of it, necessarily, is ineffable. Maybe even magic.

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The 25 greatest short stories of all time.

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American writer Ernest Hemingway working at a portable table while on a big game hunt in Kenya, ... [+] September 1952.

There is a quieter, more succinct wing of literature that thrives on pithy conciseness: the short story. Authors of the art form have perfected the concept of this type of storytelling by distilling exciting human experiences into a compact form that is easy to digest and just as engaging for the busy reader. Here, are 25 of the greatest short stories of all time, each with its own approach to brevity.

What Is A Short Story?

Compared to a novel or novella, a short story is a smaller work with a more limited scope and less developed characters. Its objective is to uncover a single incidence or series of linked incidents, aiming to evoke a single effect or mood from the reader. The concept of a short story allows for a pithy, structured plot that is laser-focused on a small cast of characters and usually, a single setting. With short stories, every word is carefully chosen to deliver a punch, sometimes in as little as several hundred words. The upper limit for a short story is sometimes likened to that of a novella, but a single short story rarely attains this much length, yet it can still leave a lasting emotional impact.

25. The Lottery Ticket By Anton Chekhov (1887)

In The Lottery Ticket , Ivan Dmitritch and his wife are thrilled when they discover that they have won the lottery. They immediately began to dream of what they would do with all of their potential newfound wealth. In the course of daydreaming, the duo finally reveals their true wishes and plans, until they are brought back to a harsh reality, Chekhov’s story is a melancholy survey of human nature, the impact of money and the surprising results of our most deeply-held desires.

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Who Should Read This: Lovers of classic Russian literature and human psychology will enjoy this story.

Where to Read : Classic Short Stories .

24. The Aleph and Other Stories By Jorge Luis Borges (1949)

In The Aleph , Borges introduces readers to some of his most complex and well-developed characters, including a Nazi who cannot redeem himself, a Mayan priest locked up in a monastery, a group of anti-Semitic Christian theologians and a woman taking revenge on her father’s murderer. This book also features another short story, The Maker , which presents characters who struggle with their own existence and sense of self.

Who Should Read This: This book is ideal for readers who enjoy philosophical and speculative fiction.

Where to Read: Penguin Random House

23. A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings By Gabriel Garcia Márquez (1968)

In this magical realist story, Márquez introduces young readers to the story of an old man with wings in a small village. Although his wings are extraordinary, Márquez invites readers to examine the old man’s humanity. Other notable characters in this story are Pelayo, Father Gonzaga, Elisenda and The Neighbor. The story’s whimsical yet profound plot directs readers to reflect on the extraordinary within the ordinary.

Who Should Read This: This book is a good fit for readers who enjoy magical realism and allegorical tales.

Where to Read: AbeBooks

22. The Collected Stories of Diane Williams By Diane Williams (2018)

Diane Williams ’ The Collected Stories of Diane Williams is an anthology of over 300 short stories that are fascinatingly strange, plotless and non-linear. As a whole, the collection is immersive, drawing readers into the astonishing inner lives of their main characters and the inner workings of Williams’ mind. As one of the masters of the short story, Williams has built a career out of defying logic and challenging traditional genre guidelines, all while bending the rules to offer readers a unique and thought-provoking literary experience.

Who Should Read This: This collection is a good fit for readers who enjoy short stories and their cumulative plots.

21. Acts of God By Ellen Gilchrist (2014)

Ellen Gilchrist’s Acts of God is a collection of short stories that feature the resilience and grace of ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances. The first story in the book follows the devastating effects of a tornado in Adkins, Arkansas, and follows four teenagers from the Fayetteville First Methodist Church Youth Group as they work together to help the affected community. Each story in this collection highlights to human compassion and the quiet heroism found in everyday life.

Who Should Read This: This collection is perfect for readers who enjoy Southern fiction and stories that celebrate people's resilience and goodness.

Where to Read: Barnes & Noble

20. Cathedral By Raymond Carver (1983)

Raymond Carver’s Cathedral follows the tale of a budding love affair between the narrator and a friend of his blind wife’s, Robert. Through a shared drawing exercise, the narrator experiences a dramatic shift in perspective. Carver’s minimalist style and focus on human connection and empathy make this a powerful and moving story.

Who Should Read This: This book is perfect for readers who appreciate minimalist fiction.

19. Sonny’s Blues By James Baldwin (1957)

James Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues understands suffering, fraternal love, and the redemptive power of music like almost nothing else in story form. Set in Harlem, the short story follows the narrator through his brother Sonny’s opiate addiction and his passion for jazz. Baldwin’s characters struggle to bridge their brotherly differences and are finally reconciled in song.

Who Should Read: This book is ideal for readers who appreciate classic literary fiction and stories of familial bonds.

18. The Necklace and Other Short Stories By Guy de Maupassant ( 1884)

In this book, Maupassant plays back the details of day-to-day life with brilliance and a wicked sense of humor. In each case, we feel, right from the start, the unmistakable presence of a literary master at work. The twists in this collection of stories reveal the superficiality of wealth and the harsh realities of social aspiration. Maupassant’s sharp social commentary and ironic twist make The Necklace a timeless story.

Who Should Read: This is a good read for people who appreciate irony and social critique.

Where to Read: Dover Publications

17. The Snows of Kilimanjaro By Ernest Hemingway ( 1936)

In The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Ernest Hemingway follows the story of an American writer who is dying from an infection in a hospital in Africa. Hemingway’s merciless sparseness and the way he alludes to regret, artistic ambition and mortality make The Snows of Kilimanjaro a terse exploration of human life and death. Hemingway’s descriptions of the African landscape increase this story’s impact on the reader's mind.

Who Should Read: This book is perfect for readers who appreciate existential literature.

Where to Read: Simon & Schuster

16. Bartleby, the Scrivener By Herman Melville (1853)

This story explores the mysterious behavior of Bartleby, a law copyist who gradually withdraws from life and becomes a stranger over time. In this book, Melville explores isolation, passive resistance and the effects of modern capitalism. Through Bartleby, Melville invites readers to reflect on individuals’ moral and ethical responsibilities toward one another, challenging us to consider the profound impact of societal structures on our personal lives.

Who Should Read: Readers interested in philosophical and existential questions will appreciate the story’s exploration of isolation, free will and the human condition.

15. To Build a Fire By Jack London (1902)

Set in the Yukon, Jack London’s To Build a Fire follows a man’s struggle for survival in extreme weather. London’s vivid descriptions and the protagonist’s grim determination highlight the brutal forces of nature and human frailty. The story shows the power of nature and the consequences of underestimating its severity. As the man battles against the freezing temperatures and his limitations, London underscores the themes of human vulnerability and the relentless, indifferent power of the natural world.

Who Should Read: Those who enjoy stories of human endurance and survival against the odds will find this tale gripping and intense.

14. A Rose for Emily By William Faulkner (1930)

Set in the fictional town of Jefferson, Mississippi, this Southern Gothic story follows the life and death of Emily Grierson. Faulkner’s careful attention to detail and narrative approach to themes like isolation, resistance and change impact societal norms, making this a compelling and haunting tale.

Who Should Read: This book is perfect for readers who appreciate Southern Gothic literature and complex storytelling techniques.

13. A Sound of Thunder By Ray Bradbury (1952)

This science fiction classic explores the concept of the butterfly effect through a time travel adventure. When a hunter steps on a butterfly in the past, he returns to a drastically altered present. Bradbury’s exploration of the interconnectedness of events and the consequences of seemingly small actions remains impactful, and his narrative brilliantly illustrates the interconnectedness of events and the fragile web of cause and effect.

Who Should Read: Fans of science fiction will appreciate Bradbury’s imaginative exploration of time travel and its consequences.

12. The Metamorphosis By Franz Kafka (1915)

Franz Kafka’s incredible story of Gregor Samsa finds him waking from sleep to discover he has been transformed into a huge insect. He immediately engages with questions about alienation and identity, and the juxtaposition of absurdity and existential terror lends itself to a lot of criticism and the harsh demands of a judgmental society. With this book, Kafka gives readers one of the finest works of 20th-century literature, which stands out for its style and themes.

Who Should Read: Fans of classic fiction who are drawn to characters that are complex and isolated.

11. The Gift of the Magi By O. Henry (1905)

O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi f ollows the heartwarming story of love and sacrifice and follows a young couple who secretly buy each other Christmas gifts. The plot twist at the end of the story displays O. Henry’s style, which showcases themes of selflessness and true love. The story’s simplicity and emotional depth make it a timeless classic.

Who Should Read: This book is ideal for readers who enjoy heartwarming, sentimental tales.

10. The Rocking-Horse Winner By D.H. Lawrence (1926)

D.H. Lawrence’s The Rocking Horse Winner centers on the life of a young boy who rides his toy rocking horse to predict winning horses in real races, hoping to gain his mother’s approval. Lawrence critiques materialism and the destructive nature of obsession. The story’s supernatural elements and tragic conclusion offer a haunting reflection on familial expectations.

Who Should Read: Perfect for readers interested in psychological and supernatural fiction.

9. Hills Like White Elephants By Ernest Hemingway ( 1927)

Set at a Spanish train station, Ernest Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants captures a conversation between a couple who need to make a difficult decision. Hemingway’s sparse prose and his use of subtext create a powerful narrative about communication and the complex nature of human relationships. The story’s minimalist style leaves much to the reader’s interpretation and imagination.

Who Should Read: This book is a good fit for readers who appreciate concise, impactful storytelling.

8. Whatever Happens, Probably Will By John W. MacIlroy (2022)

Whatever Happens, Probably Will is a compelling collection of short stories that delve into the unpredictable nature of life. MacIlroy’s approach to writing is characterized by intricate plots and richly developed characters, each facing situations where the unexpected alter their course. From moments of profound realization to sudden twists of fate, these stories explore several themes, including chance, choice and consequence. MacIlroy’s sharp prose and keen insight into human behavior make this collection thought-provoking.

Who Should Read: This book is a good fit for readers who enjoy pithy writing.

7. Her Body and Other Parties By Carmen Maria Machado (2017)

Her Body and Other Parties is a collection of short stories that mix horror , fantasy, and magical realism to explore the realities of women’s lives. Machado’s prose is both lyrical and haunting, with each story exploring themes of gender, sexuality and identity. The first story in the collection, The Husband Stitch , reimagines classic folk tales with a feminist twist, while other stories, like Especially Heinou s, offer a three-dimensional view into contemporary issues. Machado’s unique voice and inventive storytelling make this collection a modern classic.

Who Should Read: This book is great for readers who enjoy feminist literature, magical realism, and stories that push the boundaries of genre.

Where to Read: Graywolf Press

6. Never Whistle at Night By Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. (2023)

Never Whistle at Night is a dark anthology that combines horror stories laser-focused on Indigenous traditions and contemporary experiences. This collection of stories showcases stories from indigenous authors who use the horror genre to explore themes of survival, cultural identity and resilience. Each story is a testament to the rich storytelling traditions of Indigenous communities, offering suspense and profound reflections.

Who Should Read: This anthology is perfect for fans of horror fiction and those interested in Indigenous literature.

5. Out There Screaming , edited By Jordan Peele and John Joseph Adams (2023)

Jordan Peele is one of the leaders of modern-day horror-themed entertainment, so his contribution to Out There Screaming is not far-fetched. The book is a compelling anthology of horror that features a collection of stories from a diverse group of authors, each contributing their own unique voice to the genre. The stories include deep-dives into themes of fear, identity and society, often through the lens of race and culture. Peele’s influence is evident in the anthology’s blend of psychological horror and social commentary, making it a must-read for fans of dark fiction.

Who Should Read: Out There Screaming is a perfect book for fans of modern-day psychological horror.

Where to Read: Penguin Random House.

4. The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman ( 1892)

Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper is a 19th-century fictional account exploring mental health and gender roles. The story, presented as a series of journal entries, details the narrator’s obsession with the wallpaper in her bedroom and her gradual descent into insanity. Gilman’s critique of the way that women were treated in the 19th century remains relevant today.

Who Should Read: This book is ideal for those interested in feminist literature and psychological fiction.

Where to Read: This book is available at Simon & Schuster .

3. A Good Man Is Hard to Find By Flannery O’Connor (1953)

Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find is a story that follows a family road trip that goes tragically wrong. O’Connor skillfully combines dark humor with morality and redemption to create a masterpiece. The story’s shocking, violent edge and the grandmother’s confrontation with the Misfit force readers to question faith, grace, and the core of human nature.

Who Should Read: This book is ideal for readers who enjoy Southern Gothic literature and moral complexity.

Where to Read: This book is available on Amazon .

2. The Tell-Tale Heart By Edgar Allan Poe (1843)

Short story expert Edgar Allan Poe invites readers into the world of a cold-blooded killer with The Tell-Tale Heart. The gothic classic follows the life of a murderer, who is haunted by the constant beating of his victim’s heart. Poe’s use plot-twist, narration and intense psychological depth makes this a quintessential read for fans of horror and suspense. The story’s exploration of guilt and paranoia is both compelling and unsettling.

Who Should Read: This book is perfect for readers who appreciate gothic fiction and psychological thrillers.

Where to Read: This book is available on Barnes & Noble .

1. The Lottery By Shirley Jackson (1948)

Set in a town that initially seems peaceful and idyllic town, The Lottery follows a shocking and brutal ritual that takes place every year. Renowned author, Shirley Jackson criticizes societal norms and the dark side of human nature, highlighting how ordinary people can commit heinous acts under the guise of conforming with the legacy of tradition. The suspenseful buildup of the story leaves a lasting impact on the reader.

Who Should Read: This book is perfect for fans of classic horror.

Where to Read: This classic is available at Barnes & Noble .

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What are good short romance stories.

The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry (1905) This classic romance story is about true, selfless love. It follows a young couple, Della and Jim, who sacrifice their most prized items to buy each other Christmas gifts.

A Temporary Matter by Jhumpa Lahiri (1998) Part of Lahiri's collection Interpreter of Maladies , this story is about the complex nature of human relationships and how they can be strained by loss.

What Are Good Short Scary Stories?

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson (1948) Set in a seemingly quiet and peaceful village, this story reveals a shocking and horrific ritual that the townspeople partake in annually.

The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe (1843) Poe's classic fictional account of murder, madness, and guilt centers on an unnamed narrator who insists on his sanity while describing the murder of an old man.

What Are Good Short Fantasy Stories

The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu (2011) This award-winning story combines magical realism with a heartfelt exploration of cultural identity and family.

A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury (1952) A time travel adventure that explores the butterfly effect, this story follows a group of hunters who travel back to the prehistoric past.

What Are Good Short Stories For Kids?

Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak (1963) This beloved kids classic follows Max, a young boy who travels to an island inhabited by wild creatures after being sent to his room as punishment for being unruly.

The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein (1964) This is a classic, yet touching story about the relationship between a boy and a tree. It explores themes of generosity and unconditional love.

Each of the stories on this list have offered something unique, insightful and poignant. Each writer has evoked emotions through masterful storytelling and a command of brevity, making them masters of their field.

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Trump Convicted on All Counts to Become America’s First Felon President

A Manhattan jury found that he had falsified business records to conceal a sex scandal that could have hindered his 2016 campaign for the White House.

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Donald J. Trump, wearing a navy suit and a yellow tie, scowls as he sits at a defense table.

By Ben Protess , Jonah E. Bromwich , Maggie Haberman , Kate Christobek , Jesse McKinley and William K. Rashbaum

May 30, 2024

Donald J. Trump was convicted on Thursday of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal that threatened to derail his 2016 presidential campaign, capping an extraordinary trial that tested the resilience of the American justice system and transformed the former commander in chief into a felon.

The guilty verdict in Manhattan — across the board, on all 34 counts — will reverberate throughout the nation and the world as it ushers in a new era of presidential politics. Mr. Trump will carry the stain of the verdict during his third run for the White House as voters now choose between an unpopular incumbent and a convicted criminal.

While it was once unthinkable that Americans would elect a felon as their leader, Mr. Trump’s insurgent behavior delights his supporters as he bulldozes the country’s norms. Now, the man who refused to accept his 2020 election loss is already seeking to delegitimize his conviction, attempting to assert the primacy of his raw political power over the nation’s rule of law.

The Trump Manhattan Criminal Verdict, Count By Count

Former President Donald J. Trump faced 34 felony charges of falsifying business records, related to the reimbursement of hush money paid to the porn star Stormy Daniels in order to cover up a sex scandal around the 2016 presidential election.

As Mr. Trump learned his fate on Thursday, he showed little emotion, shutting his eyes and slowly shaking his head while a hush descended over the courtroom. But when he emerged, holding his jaw tense, the former president spoke to the assembled television cameras. He declared that the verdict was “a disgrace” and, with a somber expression, proclaimed: “The real verdict is going to be Nov. 5, by the people,” referring to Election Day.

The judge overseeing the case, Juan M. Merchan, released Mr. Trump on his own recognizance and set his sentencing for July 11, just days before the Republican National Convention convenes and anoints him as the presidential nominee.

Alvin L. Bragg, the prosecutor who brought the case, declined to reveal Thursday whether he would seek a prison term. The judge could put Mr. Trump behind bars for up to four years, but the former president could receive probation instead, and may never see the inside of a prison cell . His appeal could drag on for months or more, and he will remain free to campaign for the presidency while he awaits his punishment.

The 12 New Yorkers who composed the jury needed nearly 10 hours to decide a case stemming from Mr. Trump’s first White House run, when, prosecutors say, he perpetrated a fraud on the American people. The case — colored by tabloid intrigue, secret payoffs and an Oval Office pact that echoed the Watergate era — spotlighted months of scheming that begot a hush-money payment to a porn star and a plot to falsify documents to bury all trace of that deal.

“Guilty,” the jury foreman declared into a microphone 34 times, one for each false record, before he and his fellow jurors, whose names were withheld from the public for their safety, filed out of the Lower Manhattan courtroom.

Over weeks of testimony, the jury had met a varied cast of characters, including a tabloid maestro , a campaign spokeswoman and the porn star, Stormy Daniels. Their testimony built to an epic showdown between the men at the heart of the case: Mr. Trump, a real estate mogul turned reality-television impresario who exported his smash-mouth instincts to presidential politics; and the star witness against him, Michael D. Cohen, the do-anything fixer whose loyalty he lost.

In the waning days of the 2016 campaign, Mr. Cohen paid Ms. Daniels $130,000 to silence her story of a sexual liaison with Mr. Trump, who then agreed to “cook the books” to reimburse his fixer, prosecutors said. Defense lawyers attacked Mr. Cohen’s credibility — they noted that he once pleaded guilty to lying — and argued that Mr. Trump had never falsified any records.

But in closing arguments, one of Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors said that Mr. Cohen had told his lies for Mr. Trump. “We didn’t choose Michael Cohen to be our witness; we didn’t pick him up at the witness store,” said the prosecutor, Joshua Steinglass. The former president, he said, had hired Mr. Cohen “because he was willing to lie and cheat on Mr. Trump’s behalf.”

Mr. Trump, who repeatedly violated a judge’s order barring him from attacking Mr. Cohen and the jury, attended every day of the trial in a courthouse that had long ago lost its majesty , a fading hulk with cracked wood paneling and yellowed fluorescent lighting that suited the case’s seedier elements . There, in the center of a city justice system that accommodates all manner of mayhem, the former president glowered, muttered and often closed his eyes, spending much of the trial either in a meditative state or apparently asleep .

Mr. Trump still faces three other indictments in three other jurisdictions, but with those cases mired in delays, this was likely to be his only trial before Election Day. The other prosecutions concern loftier issues — Mr. Trump is charged with mishandling classified documents in Florida and plotting to subvert democracy in Washington and Georgia — but this trial sprang from the seamy milieu that had made him famous, if not notorious, as a New York gossip-page fixture.

The conviction, a humiliating defeat for a man who has dwelled in legal gray zones for decades, brings the nation’s highest office to a new low: Mr. Trump is the first president to lose, or even to face, a criminal trial.

The prosecution unfolded against the backdrop of a politically polarized nation, and reactions to the verdict could reflect that divide. Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, called the verdict a “shameful day in American history” while President Biden urged people to vote, saying, “There’s only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: at the ballot box.”

Mr. Trump’s adversaries have long hoped a conviction would wipe the former president from the political map. For them, the case could represent a rare moment of catharsis: comeuppance for a man who, in their minds, poisoned the institution of the presidency.

Yet nothing in the Constitution prevents a felon from serving in the White House. And to Mr. Trump’s base, he remains not just a man but a movement. The more legal tumult he endures, the more his supporters revere him.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump is expected to harness that image of an outlaw idol, using his conviction to paint himself as a political prisoner and the victim of a Democratic cabal. During the trial, he cast the jurors as 12 angry liberals from a hometown that had turned against him, even though they were participating in a tradition so central to American democracy that it is older than the presidency itself. And he attacked Mr. Bragg, the elected district attorney, falsely claiming he was an extension of President Biden’s campaign.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers seized on the novel nature of Mr. Bragg’s case. In New York, falsifying records is a misdemeanor, unless they were faked to hide another crime. To elevate the charges to felonies, Mr. Bragg argued that Mr. Trump had falsified the records to conceal an illegal conspiracy to influence the 2016 election.

The defense argued that Mr. Bragg was stretching the law, deploying a little-known state statute in a case involving a federal election. That approach could, they argue, lay the groundwork for an appeal.

Mr. Trump’s lead lawyer, Todd Blanche, also sought to play down the importance of the case, deriding the false records as mere “pieces of paper.”

Yet the verdict is a career-defining victory for Mr. Bragg, who had characterized the fakery as an affront to New York, the financial capital of the world.

“Our job is to follow the facts without fear or favor, and that’s what we did here,” Mr. Bragg said at a news conference in the wake of the verdict. He then paused for a moment. “I did my job. We did our jobs.” And while he said he anticipated a cacophonous reaction to the conviction, he added that “the only voice that matters is the voice of the jury, and the jury has spoken.”

The Conspiracy

Five years ago, when Mr. Bragg announced his run for district attorney, he vowed to shake up the criminal justice system in Manhattan. No more, he said, would there be two systems — one for the rich and one for everyone else. He then brought a difficult case against the 45th president, charging Mr. Trump, as he would any other defendant, with the innocuous-sounding crime of falsifying business records.

Mr. Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of that charge, one for each document he falsified as he reimbursed Mr. Cohen for the $130,000 hush-money payment to Ms. Daniels. The records included 11 invoices Mr. Cohen submitted, 12 entries in Mr. Trump’s ledger and 11 checks sent to the former fixer.

Mr. Trump signed nine of the checks from the White House, his own outsize Sharpie signature sealing his fate.

The documents, prosecutors argued, disguised the nature of the repayment to Mr. Cohen. There were no references to the hush money, only to ordinary legal expenses that arose from a “retainer” agreement.

Mr. Blanche argued that the records were accurate — Mr. Cohen, after all, was a lawyer who had expenses — but the prosecution showed that the expenses and the retainer were both fictional. Mr. Blanche also sought to minimize the election plot, asserting that “every campaign in this country is a conspiracy.” But Mr. Bragg argued that the American people were victims, deprived of important information about the candidate, and that the tactics of Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign were not only distasteful, but unlawful.

Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors, eliciting lurid testimony of sex and scandal, persuaded the jury that Mr. Trump had orchestrated a conspiracy with Mr. Cohen and David Pecker, the former publisher of The National Enquirer, to buy and bury stories that could have upended his candidacy. It began with a meeting in summer 2015 at Mr. Trump’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters — prosecutors called it “the Trump Tower conspiracy” — and ran through Election Day 2016.

Mr. Pecker, the prosecution’s leadoff witness, nonchalantly explained to the jurors how the co-conspirators had soon confronted salacious stories about the candidate’s sex life.

The first came from a doorman at a Trump building who had heard a false rumor that Mr. Trump had fathered a child out of wedlock . Another belonged to a former Playboy model who said she had carried on a monthslong affair with Mr. Trump. Mr. Pecker bought both of those stories and never published them, a practice known as “ catch and kill ,” a dark art in the supermarket tabloid world.

After the election, Mr. Pecker testified, Mr. Trump summoned him to Trump Tower. There, the president-elect, having just met with the head of the F.B.I., thanked Mr. Pecker for burying the stories.

Mr. Trump was supposed to repay Mr. Pecker, and prosecutors played a surreptitious recording that Mr. Cohen had made of Mr. Trump, who wanted to buy all the dirt that The Enquirer had accumulated on him over the years, in case something happened to the publisher or his tabloid.

“Maybe he gets hit by a truck,” Mr. Trump said, instructing Mr. Cohen to “pay with cash.”

The Porn Star

Mr. Pecker ultimately refused Mr. Trump’s payment, worried that it might implicate him in a crime.

And he wanted nothing to do with purchasing the third and most troublesome story — Ms. Daniels’s account of sex with Mr. Trump. She was shopping it at a vulnerable moment for the Trump campaign, just as the world heard a recording in which he boasted about grabbing women by the genitals. The tape, from the set of “Access Hollywood,” sent the campaign into a frenzy, according to testimony from Hope Hicks, its former spokeswoman.

Ms. Hicks, who teared up on the stand, took jurors behind the campaign’s scenes as Mr. Trump careened from one crisis to the next. He denied Ms. Daniels’s story, telling Ms. Hicks it was “absolutely, unequivocally untrue.” (He denies it still, and Mr. Blanche portrayed Ms. Daniels as an extortionist.)

The week after Ms. Hicks testified, Ms. Daniels showed up to contradict Mr. Trump from the stand, offering a graphic recounting. In riveting testimony , she described how he had summoned her for dinner inside a palatial Lake Tahoe, Nev., hotel suite in 2006. She returned from the bathroom and found Mr. Trump in his boxer shorts and T-shirt, she said. Then, they had sex.

“I was staring up at the ceiling, wondering how I got there,” she told the jury, adding that the act was brief and that Mr. Trump did not wear a condom.

Ms. Daniels said that when she asked Mr. Trump about his wife, he told her not to worry, that they didn’t even sleep in the same room — testimony that prompted Mr. Trump to shake his head in disgust and mutter “bullshit” to his lawyers. His outburst was loud enough that it later drew a rebuke from Justice Merchan, who called it “contemptuous.”

The former president’s lawyers, cross-examining Ms. Daniels, sought to paint her as an opportunist capitalizing on a fiction, noting that she had sold “Team Stormy” T-shirts, a $40 “Patron Saint of Indictments” candle and even a comic book dramatizing her clash with the former president.

“You’re celebrating the indictment by selling things from your store, right?” a defense lawyer asked.

“Not unlike Mr. Trump,” Ms. Daniels replied, perhaps a reference to his prolific merchandise-peddling.

The sordid elements of her testimony had little bearing on the charges of faked business records. Her payoff did. In a crucial passage of testimony, Ms. Daniels confirmed that she had “accepted an offer” from Mr. Cohen to stay silent.

The Showdown

Even that did not prove that Mr. Trump had falsified records to disguise his reimbursement of Mr. Cohen. For that, the prosecution needed Mr. Cohen himself.

During his decade as a Trump henchman, Mr. Cohen distinguished himself with his volatility. On the stand, however, he was mostly steady , and he offered jurors the only direct link between the former president and the false records.

Mr. Cohen testified that, just days before Mr. Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, he had met with the president-elect at Trump Tower. There, he said, Mr. Trump gave his blessing to a simple way to hide the payoff while making Mr. Cohen whole: pretend the reimbursement was for legal work. Mr. Trump’s chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg, handled the details, but as was customary, Mr. Cohen testified, “the boss” granted permission.

During closing arguments, the prosecution sought to corroborate Mr. Cohen’s account, producing what one prosecutor called “the smoking guns” of the case: Mr. Weisselberg’s handwritten notes about the reimbursement. The jotting appeared on a copy of Mr. Cohen’s bank statement — the very one showing that Mr. Cohen had paid off Ms. Daniels.

“Did Mr. Weisselberg say in front of Mr. Trump that those monthly payments would be, you know, like a retainer for legal services?” Susan Hoffinger, one of the prosecutors, asked Mr. Cohen.

“Yes,” he said.

“What, if anything, did Mr. Trump say at that time?” she also asked.

“He approved it,” Mr. Cohen replied, noting that Mr. Trump had then added: “This is going to be one heck of a ride in D.C.”

The plot reached into the Oval Office, where Mr. Cohen said he met again with Mr. Trump, who promised that a check would soon arrive.

A year later, they had a falling-out after the hush-money deal came to light in The Wall Street Journal, and Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to federal crimes involving the hush money. Mr. Trump washed his hands of Mr. Cohen, who turned on the man he had once idolized.

During Mr. Cohen’s testimony, Mr. Trump brought his campaign to the courtroom, summoning an entourage of supporters to sit in the rows behind the defense table. The guests included the speaker of the House and other members of Congress, his adult sons, the actor Joe Piscopo and a former leader of the New York chapter of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang.

With Mr. Cohen on the stand, Mr. Blanche assailed his credibility, highlighting his criminal record, his pattern of lies and his obsession with exacting revenge on Mr. Trump. Mr. Blanche also argued that Mr. Cohen had profited from his hatred for Mr. Trump with two books and a lucrative podcast deal. He played the jury an excerpt from the podcast in which the former fixer sounded nearly maniacal as he reveled in the news of Mr. Trump’s 2023 indictment in the case.

“I truly hope that this man ends up in prison,” Mr. Cohen said giddily.

On the stand, Mr. Cohen was more subdued. He bent, but did not break under the pressure. And when the prosecution questioned him a second time, he stuck to his testimony that Mr. Trump had approved the scheme to falsify the records.

“When you submitted each of your 11 invoices,” Ms. Hoffinger asked, “was that true or false?”

“It was false,” Mr. Cohen confirmed.

And the check stubs that reflected a supposed retainer?

Mr. Blanche argued that Mr. Trump had signed the checks without paying them much mind, and that Mr. Cohen was responsible for the invoices. But the prosecution highlighted evidence that portrayed Mr. Trump as a micromanager who would never miss that sort of detail, including Mr. Trump’s own books, which contained a chapter called “How to Pinch Pennies” and the advice “always question invoices.”

The criminal conviction capped a brutal stretch of legal defeats for Mr. Trump in New York. He started the year in a federal courthouse, where a jury found him liable for defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll when he claimed he hadn’t sexually abused her, and ordered him to pay her more than $80 million . The next month, a judge concluded that Mr. Trump had fraudulently inflated his net worth to win favorable financial deals, and imposed a judgment of more than $450 million .

While those cases delivered devastating personal financial blows, only Mr. Bragg’s trial could send the former president to prison, and America into an era of uncertainty.

“This is long from over,” Mr. Trump declared on Thursday, minutes after his conviction.

Wesley Parnell and Michael Rothfeld contributed reporting.

Ben Protess is an investigative reporter at The Times, writing about public corruption. He has been covering the various criminal investigations into former President Trump and his allies. More about Ben Protess

Jonah E. Bromwich covers criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan district attorney’s office and state criminal courts in Manhattan. More about Jonah E. Bromwich

Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman

Kate Christobek is a reporter covering the civil and criminal cases against former president Donald J. Trump for The Times. More about Kate Christobek

Jesse McKinley is a Times reporter covering upstate New York, courts and politics. More about Jesse McKinley

William K. Rashbaum is a Times reporter covering municipal and political corruption, the courts and broader law enforcement topics in New York. More about William K. Rashbaum

Our Coverage of the Trump Hush-Money Trial

Guilty Verdict : Donald Trump was convicted on all 34 counts of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal that threatened his bid for the White House in 2016, making him the first American president to be declared a felon .

Next Steps: The judge in the case set Trump’s sentencing for July 11, and Trump already indicated that he plans to appeal. Here’s what else may happen .

Reactions: Trump’s conviction reverberated quickly across the country and over the world . Here’s what Trump , voters , New Yorkers , Republicans and the White House had to say.

The Presidential Race : The verdict will test America’s traditions, legal institutions and ability to hold an election under historic partisan tension , reshuffling a race that has been locked in stasis and defined by a polarizing former president.

Making the Case: Over six weeks and the testimony of 20 witnesses, the Manhattan district attorney’s office wove a sprawling story of election interference and falsified business records.

Legal Luck Runs Out: The four criminal cases that threatened Trump’s freedom had been stumbling along, pleasing his advisers. Then his good fortune expired .

Connecting the Dots: As rumors circulated of Trump’s reported infidelity, two accounts of women being paid to stay silent about their encounters became central to his indictment.

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