📚 Essays

The prose of thinking out loud — the descendants of Montaigne, argument and reflection in a length you can read in one sitting.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject essays in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	Essais	Montaigne, Michel de	1600	294
	Mere Christianity	C. S. Lewis	1943	109
	The rambler	Samuel Johnson	1750	91
	The Origins of Totalitarianism	Hannah Arendt	1951	64
	Science and education	Thomas Henry Huxley	1893	56
	Painting as a Pastime	Winston S. Churchill	1921	49
	Die kleinen Tugenden. Erzählungen	Natalia Ginzburg	1962	36
	slouching towards bethlehem	Joan Didion	1967	35
	Language, thought, and reality	Benjamin Lee Whorf	1956	34
	The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays	Albert Camus	1955	30
	Me Talk Pretty One Day	David Sedaris	2000	29
	Science and the modern world	Alfred North Whitehead	1925	28
	Born a Crime	Trevor Noah	2016	27
	Mythologies	Roland Barthes	1953	26
	One Man's Meat	E. B. White	1941	25
	Hey rub-a-dub-dub	Theodore Dreiser	1920	23
	Reason & violence	R. D. Laing	1964	21
	The essays of Francis Bacon	Francis Bacon	1900	20
	When You Are Engulfed in Flames	David Sedaris	2007	19
	El infinito en un junco	Irene Vallejo	2020	19
	The White Album	Joan Didion	1979	17
	How to Be Alone	Jonathan Franzen	2002	16
	The View From the Cheap Seats	Neil Gaiman	2016	13
	Psychology and the human dilemma	Rollo May	1967	12
	E.E. Cummings	E. E. Cummings	1965	11
	Psychotherapy and Existentialism	Viktor Emil Frankl	1967	11
	Freedom from the Known	Jiddu Krishnamurti	1959	10
	The lives of a cell	Lewis Thomas	1974	10
	Step Across This Line	Salman Rushdie	2002	10
	Only a Trillion [14 essays]	Isaac Asimov	1957	9

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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EthicsEthologyEtiquetteEtymologyEvolutionExaminations

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