List: American essayists

by likeorhate

•  Ayn Rand

  Ayn Rand (born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum; February 2 1905 – March 6, 1982), was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism. Born and educated in Russia, Rand immigrated to the United States in 1926. She worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood and had a play produced on Broadway in 1935–1936.

  

  37.8%
  

  40.0%
  

  22.2%
  
•  Charles Baxter (author)

  Charles Baxter (born 13 May 1947 in Minneapolis) to John and Mary Barber (Eaton) Baxter. He is an American author known for blending a quiet, sometimes absurdist wit with a profound sympathy for his far-from-perfect characters; he has also attracted attention for the consummate brilliance of his prose. He is likewise celebrated as an engaging and even deeply moving performer of his own work in public readings.

  

  35.2%
  

  25.0%
  

  39.8%
  
•  Ernest Hemingway

  Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American writer and journalist. During his lifetime he had seven novels, six collections of short stories, and two works of non-fiction published, with a further three novels, four collections of short stories, and three non-fiction autobiographical works published after his death.

  

  37.1%
  

  22.9%
  

  40.0%
  
•  E. B. White

  Elwyn Brooks "E. B. " White (July 11, 1899 – October 1, 1985) was an American writer. A long-time contributor to "The New Yorker" magazine, he also wrote many famous books for both adults and children, such as the popular Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little.

  

  37.3%
  

  34.3%
  

  28.4%
  
•  Emma Goldman

  Emma Goldman (June 27, 1869 – May 14, 1940) was an anarchist known for her political activism, writing and speeches. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Kovno in the Russian Empire, Goldman emigrated to the US in 1885 and lived in New York City, where she joined the burgeoning anarchist movement.

  

  31.0%
  

  41.4%
  

  27.6%
  
•  Herman Melville

  Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist and poet, whose work is often classified as part of the genre of dark romanticism. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and novella Billy Budd, the latter of which was published posthumously.

  

  33.3%
  

  33.3%
  

  33.3%
  
•  Helen Keller

  Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968) was an American author, political activist and lecturer. She was the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. The story of how Keller's teacher, Anne Sullivan, broke through the isolation imposed by a near complete lack of language, allowing the girl to blossom as she learned to communicate, has become known worldwide through the dramatic depictions of the play and film The Miracle Worker.

  

  34.2%
  

  23.7%
  

  42.1%
  
•  Hunter S. Thompson

  Hunter Stockton Thompson (July 18, 1937 – February 20, 2005) was an American journalist and author, most famous for his roman à clef Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He is credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of reporting where reporters involve themselves in the action to such a degree that they become central figures of their stories. He is also known for his use of psychedelics, alcohol, firearms, and his iconoclastic contempt for authoritarianism.

  

  36.7%
  

  22.4%
  

  40.8%
  
•  Isaac Asimov

  Isaac Asimov, was an American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited about 500 books and over 9,000 letters and postcards. His works have been published in nine of the ten major categories of the Dewey Decimal System . Isaac Asimov is widely considered a master of the science-fiction genre and, along with Robert A.

  

  35.4%
  

  35.4%
  

  29.2%
  
•  John Updike

  John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic. Updike's most famous work is his Rabbit series which chronicled the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to his death. Both Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit At Rest (1990) received the Pulitzer Prize.

  

  32.3%
  

  27.4%
  

  40.3%
  
•  Joanna Russ

  Joanna Russ (born February 22, 1937) is an American writer, academic and feminist. She is the author of a number of works of science fiction, fantasy and feminist literary criticism and is best known for The Female Man, a novel combining utopian fiction and satire. It used the device of parallel worlds as a form of a mediation of the ways that different societies might produce very different versions of the same person, and how all might interact and respond to sexism.

  

  40.5%
  

  21.6%
  

  37.8%
  
•  Jerry Pournelle

  Jerry Eugene Pournelle (born August 7, 1933) is an American science fiction writer, essayist and journalist who contributed for many years to the computer magazine Byte and has since 1998 been maintaining his own website/blog. From the beginning, Pournelle's work has engaged strong military themes. Several books are centered on a fictional mercenary infantry force known as Falkenberg's Legion. There are strong parallels between these stories and the Childe Cycle mercenary stories by Gordon R.

  

  37.8%
  

  24.3%
  

  37.8%
  
•  Kurt Vonnegut

  Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American novelist who wrote works blending satire, black comedy, and science fiction, such as Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Cat's Cradle (1963), and Breakfast of Champions (1973). He was known for his humanist beliefs as well as being honorary president of the American Humanist Association. He is widely considered one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century.

  

  36.4%
  

  33.3%
  

  30.3%
  
•  Kathy Acker

  Kathy Acker (née Karen Lehmann) (18 April 1947 – 30 November 1997) was an American experimental novelist, punk poet, playwright, essayist, postmodernist and sex-positive feminist writer. She was strongly influenced by the Black Mountain School, William S. Burroughs, David Antin, French critical theory, philosophy, and pornography.

  

  36.4%
  

  36.4%
  

  27.3%
  
•  Ken Kesey

  Kenneth Elton "Ken" Kesey (September 17, 1935 – November 10, 2001) was an American author, best known for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), and as a counter-cultural figure who considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. "I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a hippie," Kesey said in a 1999 interview with Robert K. Elder.

  

  41.2%
  

  32.4%
  

  26.5%
  
•  Murray Rothbard

  Murray Newton Rothbard (March 2, 1926 – January 7, 1995) was an American intellectual, individualist anarchist, author, and economist of the Austrian School who helped define modern libertarianism and popularized a form of free-market anarchism he termed "anarcho-capitalism". Rothbard wrote over twenty books.

  

  51.4%
  

  22.9%
  

  25.7%
  
•  Mordecai Kaplan

  Mordecai Menahem Kaplan (June 11, 1881, Švenčionys – November 8, 1983, New York City), a rabbi, essayist and Jewish educator, was the ideologue of Reconstructionist Judaism which he founded with his son-in-law Ira Eisenstein. Kaplan was born in Švenčionys, Lithuania to Rabbi Israel and Haya (Anna) Kaplan. In 1889 he immigrated to the United States with his mother and sisters to join his father in New York who was work with the Chief Rabbi Jacob Joseph.

  

  31.7%
  

  31.7%
  

  36.6%
  
•  Paul Auster

  Paul Benjamin Auster (born February 3, 1947) is an American author known for works blending absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction and the search for identity and personal meaning in works such as The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002) and The Brooklyn Follies (2005).

  

  42.9%
  

  28.6%
  

  28.6%
  
•  Robert Anton Wilson

  Robert Anton Wilson (born Robert Edward Wilson, January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007), the American author of 33 influential books, became, at various times, a novelist, philosopher, essayist, editor, playwright, futurist, libertarian and self-described agnostic mystic. Recognized as an Episkopos, Pope, and a Saint of Discordianism by Discordians who care to label him as such, Wilson helped publicize the group/religion/melee through his writings, interviews, and strolls.

  

  0.0%
  

  41.7%
  

  58.3%
  
•  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, philosopher, and poet, best remembered for leading the Transcendentalist movement of the mid 19th century. His teachings directly influenced the growing New Thought movement of the mid 1800s. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society.

  

  15.8%
  

  21.1%
  

  63.2%
  
•  Stephen Jay Gould

  Stephen Jay Gould (September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In the latter years of his life, Gould also taught biology and evolution at New York University near his home in SoHo.

  

  31.3%
  

  34.4%
  

  34.4%
  
•  Sylvia Plath

  Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, children's author, and short story author. Known primarily for her poetry, Plath also wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. The book's protagonist, Esther Greenwood, is a bright, ambitious student at Smith College who begins to experience a mental breakdown while interning for a fashion magazine in New York.

  

  71.4%
  

  28.6%
  

  0.0%
  
•  Theodore Roosevelt

  Theodore Roosevelt was the 26th President of the United States. He is well remembered for his energetic persona, range of interests and achievements, leadership of the Progressive Movement, model of masculinity, and his "cowboy" image. He was a leader of the Republican Party and founder of the short-lived Progressive ("Bull Moose") Party of 1912. Before becoming President (1901–1909) he held offices at the municipal, state, and federal level of government.

  

  19.0%
  

  28.6%
  

  52.4%
  
•  Thomas Pynchon

  Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. (born May 8, 1937) is an American novelist based in New York City and noted for his dense and complex works of fiction. Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon spent two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known: V.

  

  33.3%
  

  33.3%
  

  33.3%
  
•  Washington Irving

  Washington Irving (April 3, 1783 – November 28, 1859) was an American author, essayist, biographer and historian of the early 19th century. He was best known for his short stories "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle", both of which appear in his book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

  

  40.0%
  

  50.0%
  

  10.0%