essay in nonfictional prose

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• Practising Paper 1: Prose non-fiction
• Practising Paper 1

As on the old course, prose extracts in Paper 1 can come equally from works of non-fiction as well as fiction. Diaries, speeches, letters, travel writing, autobiography and journalism are some of the more common kinds of literary non-fiction prose writing that could ultimately be used and it is therefore important to spend time on the course studying this literary form. Many of the elements that comprise non-fiction...

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100 Major Works of Modern Creative Nonfiction

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• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

Essays , memoirs , autobiographies , biographies , travel writing , history, cultural studies, nature writing —all of these fit under the broad heading of creative nonfiction , and all are represented in this list of 100 major works of creative nonfiction published by British and American writers over the past 90 years or so. They're arranged alphabetically by author last name.

Recommended Creative Nonfiction

• Edward Abbey, "Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness" (1968)
• James Agee, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" (1941)
• Martin Amis, "Experience" (1995)
• Maya Angelou , "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" (1970)
• Russell Baker, "Growing Up" (1982)
• James Baldwin , "Notes of a Native Son" (1963)
• Julian Barnes, "Nothing to Be Frightened Of" (2008)
• Alan Bennett, "Untold Stories" (2005)
• Wendell Berry, "Recollected Essays" (1981)
• Bill Bryson, "Notes From a Small Island" (1995)
• Anthony Burgess, "Little Wilson and Big God: Being the First Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess" (1987)
• Joseph Campbell, "The Hero With a Thousand Faces" (1949)
• Truman Capote , "In Cold Blood" (1965)
• Rachel Carson, "Silent Spring" (1962)
• Pat Conroy, "The Water Is Wide" (1972)
• Harry Crews, "A Childhood: The Biography of a Place" (1978)
• Joan Didion, "We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction" (2006)
• Joan Didion, "The Year of Magical Thinking" (2005)
• Annie Dillard, "An American Childhood" (1987)
• Annie Dillard, "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" (1974)
• Barbara Ehrenreich, "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" (2001)
• Gretel Ehrlich, "The Solace of Open Spaces" (1986)
• Loren Eiseley, "The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature" (1957)
• Ralph Ellison, "Shadow and Act" (1964)
• Nora Ephron, "Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women" (1975)
• Joseph Epstein, "Snobbery: The American Version" (2002)
• Richard P. Feynman, "The Feynman Lectures on Physics" (1964)
• Shelby Foote, "The Civil War: A Narrative" (1974)
• Ian Frazier, "Great Plains" (1989)
• Paul Fussell, "The Great War and Modern Memory" (1975)
• Stephen Jay Gould, "Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History" (1977)
• Robert Graves, "Good-Bye to All That" (1929)
• Alex Haley, "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" (1965)
• Pete Hamill, "A Drinking Life: A Memoir" (1994)
• Ernest Hemingway , "A Moveable Feast" (1964)
• Michael Herr, "Dispatches" (1977)
• John Hersey, "Hiroshima" (1946)
• Laura Hillenbrand, "Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption" (2010)
• Edward Hoagland, "The Edward Hoagland Reader" (1979)
• Eric Hoffer, "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements" (1951)
• Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" (1963)
• Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, "Farewell to Manzanar" (1973)
• Langston Hughes , "The Big Sea" (1940)
• Zora Neale Hurston , "Dust Tracks on a Road" (1942)
• Aldous Huxley, "Collected Essays" (1958)
• Clive James, "Reliable Essays: The Best of Clive James" (2001)
• Alfred Kazin, "A Walker in the City" (1951)
• Tracy Kidder, "House" (1985)
• Maxine Hong Kingston, "The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood Among Ghosts" (1989)
• Thomas Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (1962)
• William Least Heat-Moon, "Blue Highways: A Journey Into America" (1982)
• Bernard Levin, "Enthusiasms" (1983)
• Barry Lopez, "Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape" (1986)
• David McCullough, "Truman" (1992)
• Dwight Macdonald, "Against The American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture" (1962)
• John McPhee, "Coming Into the Country" (1977)
• Rosemary Mahoney, "Whoredom in Kimmage: The Private Lives of Irish Women" (1993)
• Norman Mailer, "The Armies of the Night" (1968)
• Peter Matthiessen, "The Snow Leopard" (1979)
• H.L. Mencken, "A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing" (1949)
• Joseph Mitchell, "Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories" (1992)
• Jessica Mitford, "The American Way of Death" (1963)
• N. Scott Momaday, "Names" (1977)
• Lewis Mumford, "The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects" (1961)
• Vladimir Nabokov, "Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited" (1967)
• P.J. O'Rourke, "Parliament of Whores" (1991)
• Susan Orlean, "My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere" (2004)
• George Orwell , "Down and Out in Paris and London" (1933)
• George Orwell, "Essays" (2002)
• Cynthia Ozick, "Metaphor and Memory" (1989)
• Robert Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (1975)
• Richard Rodriguez, "Hunger of Memory" (1982)
• Lillian Ross, "Picture" (1952)
• David Sedaris, "Me Talk Pretty One Day" (2000)
• Richard Selzer, "Taking the World in for Repairs" (1986)
• Zadie Smith, "Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays" (2009)
• Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation and Other Essays" (1966)
• John Steinbeck, "Travels with Charley" (1962)
• Studs Terkel, "Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression" (1970)
• Lewis Thomas, "The Lives of a Cell" (1974)
• E.P. Thompson, "The Making of the English Working Class" (1963; rev. 1968)
• Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream" (1971)
• James Thurber, "My Life and Hard Times" (1933)
• Lionel Trilling, "The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society" (1950)
• Barbara Tuchman, "The Guns of August" (1962)
• John Updike, "Self-Consciousness" (1989)
• Gore Vidal, "United States: Essays 1952–1992" (1993)
• Sarah Vowell, "The Wordy Shipmates" (2008)
• Alice Walker , "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose" (1983)
• David Foster Wallace, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments" (1997)
• James D. Watson, "The Double Helix" (1968)
• Eudora Welty, "One Writer's Beginnings" (1984)
• E.B. White , "Essays of E.B. White" (1977)
• E.B. White, "One Man's Meat" (1944)
• Isabel Wilkerson, "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration" (2010)
• Tom Wolfe, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" (1968)
• Tom Wolfe, "The Right Stuff" (1979)
• Tobias Wolff, "This Boy's Life: A Memoir" (1989)
• Virginia Woolf , "A Room of One's Own" (1929)
• Richard Wright, "Black Boy" (1945)
• What is a Familiar Essay in Composition?
• Creative Nonfiction
• Direct Objects in English Grammar
• What You Should Know About Travel Writing
• Definition and Examples of Vignettes in Prose
• detail (composition)
• Definition Examples of Collage Essays
• What Is a Personal Essay (Personal Statement)?
• List (Grammar and Sentence Styles)
• Tips on Great Writing: Setting the Scene
• What Is Literary Journalism?
• Stream of Consciousness Writing
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• How to Define Autobiography
• Point of View in Grammar and Composition

25 Great Nonfiction Essays You Can Read Online for Free

Alison Doherty

Alison Doherty is a writing teacher and part time assistant professor living in Brooklyn, New York. She has an MFA from The New School in writing for children and teenagers. She loves writing about books on the Internet, listening to audiobooks on the subway, and reading anything with a twisty plot or a happily ever after.

View All posts by Alison Doherty

I love reading books of nonfiction essays and memoirs , but sometimes have a hard time committing to a whole book. This is especially true if I don’t know the author. But reading nonfiction essays online is a quick way to learn which authors you like. Also, reading nonfiction essays can help you learn more about different topics and experiences.

Besides essays on Book Riot,  I love looking for essays on The New Yorker , The Atlantic , The Rumpus , and Electric Literature . But there are great nonfiction essays available for free all over the Internet. From contemporary to classic writers and personal essays to researched ones—here are 25 of my favorite nonfiction essays you can read today.

“Beware of Feminist Lite” by  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The author of We Should All Be Feminists  writes a short essay explaining the danger of believing men and woman are equal only under certain conditions.

“It’s Silly to Be Frightened of Being Dead” by Diana Athill

A 96-year-old woman discusses her shifting attitude towards death from her childhood in the 1920s when death was a taboo subject, to World War 2 until the present day.

“Letter from a Region in my Mind” by James Baldwin

There are many moving and important essays by James Baldwin . This one uses the lens of religion to explore the Black American experience and sexuality. Baldwin describes his move from being a teenage preacher to not believing in god. Then he recounts his meeting with the prominent Nation of Islam member Elijah Muhammad.

“Relations” by Eula Biss

Biss uses the story of a white woman giving birth to a Black baby that was mistakenly implanted during a fertility treatment to explore racial identities and segregation in society as a whole and in her own interracial family.

“Friday Night Lights” by Buzz Bissinger

A comprehensive deep dive into the world of high school football in a small West Texas town.

“The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Coates examines the lingering and continuing affects of slavery on  American society and makes a compelling case for the descendants of slaves being offered reparations from the government.

“Why I Write” by Joan Didion

This is one of the most iconic nonfiction essays about writing. Didion describes the reasons she became a writer, her process, and her journey to doing what she loves professionally.

“Go Gentle Into That Good Night” by Roger Ebert

With knowledge of his own death, the famous film critic ponders questions of mortality while also giving readers a pep talk for how to embrace life fully.

“My Mother’s Tongue” by Zavi Kang Engles

In this personal essay, Engles celebrates the close relationship she had with her mother and laments losing her Korean fluency.

“My Life as an Heiress” by Nora Ephron

As she’s writing an important script, Ephron imagines her life as a newly wealthy woman when she finds out an uncle left her an inheritance. But she doesn’t know exactly what that inheritance is.

“My FatheR Spent 30 Years in Prison. Now He’s Out.” by Ashley C. Ford

Ford describes the experience of getting to know her father after he’s been in prison for almost all of her life. Bridging the distance in their knowledge of technology becomes a significant—and at times humorous—step in rebuilding their relationship.

“Bad Feminist” by Roxane Gay

There’s a reason Gay named her bestselling essay collection after this story. It’s a witty, sharp, and relatable look at what it means to call yourself a feminist.

“The Empathy Exams” by Leslie Jamison

Jamison discusses her job as a medical actor helping to train medical students to improve their empathy and uses this frame to tell the story of one winter in college when she had an abortion and heart surgery.

“What I Learned from a Fitting Room Disaster About Clothes and Life” by Scaachi Koul

One woman describes her history with difficult fitting room experiences culminating in one catastrophe that will change the way she hopes to identify herself through clothes.

“Breasts: the Odd Couple” by Una LaMarche

LaMarche examines her changing feelings about her own differently sized breasts.

“How I Broke, and Botched, the Brandon Teena Story” by Donna Minkowitz

A journalist looks back at her own biased reporting on a news story about the sexual assault and murder of a trans man in 1993. Minkowitz examines how ideas of gender and sexuality have changed since she reported the story, along with how her own lesbian identity influenced her opinions about the crime.

“Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell

In this famous essay, Orwell bemoans how politics have corrupted the English language by making it more vague, confusing, and boring.

“Letting Go” by David Sedaris

The famously funny personal essay author , writes about a distinctly unfunny topic of tobacco addiction and his own journey as a smoker. It is (predictably) hilarious.

“Joy” by Zadie Smith

Smith explores the difference between pleasure and joy by closely examining moments of both, including eating a delicious egg sandwich, taking drugs at a concert, and falling in love.

“Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan

Tan tells the story of how her mother’s way of speaking English as an immigrant from China changed the way people viewed her intelligence.

“Consider the Lobster” by David Foster Wallace

The prolific nonfiction essay and fiction writer  travels to the Maine Lobster Festival to write a piece for Gourmet Magazine. With his signature footnotes, Wallace turns this experience into a deep exploration on what constitutes consciousness.

“I Am Not Pocahontas” by Elissa Washuta

Washuta looks at her own contemporary Native American identity through the lens of stereotypical depictions from 1990s films.

“Once More to the Lake” by E.B. White

E.B. White didn’t just write books like Charlotte’s Web and The Elements of Style . He also was a brilliant essayist. This nature essay explores the theme of fatherhood against the backdrop of a lake within the forests of Maine.

“Pell-Mell” by Tom Wolfe

The inventor of “new journalism” writes about the creation of an American idea by telling the story of Thomas Jefferson snubbing a European Ambassador.

“The Death of the Moth” by Virginia Woolf

In this nonfiction essay, Wolf describes a moth dying on her window pane. She uses the story as a way to ruminate on the lager theme of the meaning of life and death.

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Non- Fictional Prose – Definition, Bature, Elements & Style

What is Non- Fictional Prose ?

It is difficult to define non-fictional prose literature. This type of writing is distinct from the bold factual statements found in old chronicles, business letters, or impersonal informational messages. Non-fictional prose literature includes writing intended to instruct (but not highly scientific or erudite writings that lack aesthetic concern), persuade, convert, or convey experience or reality through factual or spiritual revelation.

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Non-fictional prose genres cover a wide range of topics and come in a wide range of shapes. There are probably more than half of all the things that have been written in countries that have their own literature. If this is true in quantitative terms, it means that more than half of what has been written has been in countries with their own literature. Non-fictional prose genres have thrived in almost every country with a well-developed literature. Political and polemical writings, biographical and autobiographical literature, and philosophical and moral or religious writings are some of the types of writings.

From the Renaissance onward, from the 16th century onward in Europe, writing became more personal. This was a big change in writing. It was often in letters, private diaries, or confessions that the author tried to hide his or her own thoughts and feelings. Also becoming more important were aphorisms in the style of the ancient Roman philosophers Seneca and Epictetus, imaginary dialogues and historical narratives, as well as journalistic articles and very wide-ranging essays. From the 19th century, writers in Romance and Slavic languages, especially and to a lesser extent, British and American writers, thought that literature is truly modern when it has a high level of self-awareness and tries to think about its purpose and technique over and over again. They didn’t just write stories and poems. They also wrote prefaces, reflections, essays, self-portraits, and critical articles to explain their work and show how they did it. The French poet Charles Baudelaire said that no great poet could ever resist the temptation to also become a critic—a critic of other people and of himself, he said. As a result, most modern writers who live outside of the United States have written a lot more non-fictional prose than poetry, fiction, or drama. People who wrote 20th-century literature like Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, or Thomas Mann and André Gide, for example, may think that their more imaginative writing is just as important as the rest of their work.

It’s almost impossible to come up with a single way to describe non-fictional writing. I think the concern that any definition is a limitation, and maybe even a snub of the most important parts, is more relevant to this huge and diverse literature than anywhere else. People have been grouping literary works into types and modes for a long time. This is because the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers came up with literary genres.

Elements of Non-fictional Prose

In this part, we will talk about the elements of non-fictional prose: 

Because non-fictional prose literature is so wide-ranging and diverse , it can’t be said that it has a single goal, technique, or style. If you look at what it isn’t, you can figure out what it isn’t. There are a lot of exceptions that can always be found in such a huge amount of writing to show that any rule or generalisation is wrong. None of these types of writing should be done in a prescriptive way. They should be done in a way that doesn’t tell you what to do. There are no rules for determining whether a dialogue, a confession, or a piece of religious or scientific writing is good, mediocre, or bad. Each author must be appreciated and praised, mostly in his own right. When F.R. Leavis was writing in 1957, he said that the only technique that forced words to show a very personal way of feeling. Intensity might be a good way to judge how good someone is, but it can be hard to find. Polemicists and passionate essayists have a lot more of it than other great people. Virginia Woolf said that the 19th-century critic William Hazlitt’s style was like that of a lover: it made his critical essays more passionate. But Charles Lamb, Walter Pater, and Hippolyte Taine, two of the most important English essayists of the 19th century, were also loved, but in a different way. Others have been aloof, seeming to not care about what they were writing about. La Rochefoucauld, a French epigrammatist of the 17th century, was even sarcastic. These people are very passionate, but in a very different way.  

A 19th-century English poet named Samuel Taylor Coleridge gave the name “primary imagination” to writers who had near-divine powers, but the imagination at work in non-fictional prose doesn’t deserve that title. It doesn’t even come close. Non-fictional prose, on the other hand, shows imagination in the fanciful creation of decorative details, in digressions that are practised as an art and have a character of pleasant nonchalance, and in wit and humour that make the reader feel like they know the author. If you write that kind of prose, you can talk about almost any subject you want. The way issues are dealt with can be very didactic and still be in the literary world. For a long time, in many countries, in many languages, in mediaeval Latin, in the writings of Renaissance humanists, and in the writings of the Enlightenment, a lot of literature was meant to teach people how to do things. The idea of art for art’s sake is a new one in the history of culture. Even in the few countries where it was used in the 19th century, it didn’t rule. The ease with which digressions can be added to that kind of prose gives non-fictional writing a freedom that other types of writing don’t have. Any standard of perfection means that there must be implicit rules and vague standards like those that have been set for comedy, tragedy, the ode, the short storey and even the novel. This is why this kind of literature isn’t as good as other types of literature, which are better when they break the rules than when they follow them. The good thing is that in a lot of nonfiction that doesn’t have a lot of structure, the reader gets a sense of ease and nonchalance, a sense of calm, and the rarest of all writing virtues: naturalness.   

There should not be any tension, monotony, or self-consciousness in writing non-fictional prose like there is when you write a story. Flaubert and Maupassant’s fans spend a lot of time looking for le mot juste (the right word) in non-fictional writing. The novel and short storey, on the other hand, are much more important in terms of finding the right word. As an English author, he called literature “that rare, almost miraculous use of language by which someone truly says what he means.” Chesterton himself was more successful with his rambling volumes of reflections and religious apologetics than with his novels, but he said that literature was that rare, almost miraculous use of language. If you read an essay, a report or a travel storey, the author doesn’t want to overwhelm his readers by making them think he knows where he’s going, like a dramatist or a detective-story writer might do. Some rambling casualness, seemingly irrelevant anecdotes, and hints about what the author wants his readers to think are often more effective than extreme brevity.

There is also another way to write that pays more attention to the rhythm and elegance of prose, in the style of the ancient Roman orator Cicero. Essayist William Hazlitt said that the British statesman Edmund Burke (1729–97) had the best style and the best prose that didn’t fall over the edge of poetry. He said that this was the closest to poetry that he had ever seen. Many English writers have liked to write in a harmonious, rhetorical way. This may have been because they were familiar with Cicero, but also because the Bible’s official text had a big impact on their writing (1611). Martin Luther’s translations of the New Testament (1522) and the Old Testament (1534) have had a big impact on the way Germans write and think about the world.

American and British readers no longer liked this kind of writing in the 20th century. They no longer looked up to Latin orators and Biblical prose as models. German literature, on the other hand, was more likely to be praised for its harmonious balance and eloquence. In other languages that were more closely related to Latin, a musical style, which was like a long poem in prose, was more often practised, as in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Italian writings, Andre’ Gide’s French writings, and Rainer Maria Rilke’s German writings, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Non-fictional writing, with its lack of cumulative continuity and smaller size, seems to make it easier for readers to deal with a style like this one. In novels like Marius the Epicurean (1885) and sometimes in Thomas Mann’s fiction, this style can be a turn-off for the reader. When writing non-fiction, it’s easier to add hints of irony, archaisms, alliterations and even authorial interventions that might not be so easy to do when writing a storey. Critics have said that paying too much attention to style can make it hard to get the big picture in fiction. They say that some of the best novelists, like Dickens, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, and Zola, wrote bad at times. It is common for essayists, historians, orators, and divines to pretend to be happy-go-lucky in order to put them on the same level as the average reader. But they know that language and style are important. They need to know what kinds of things they can use to make vivid images, brilliant similes, well-balanced sentences, or surprise epigrammatic effects.

History of English Literature

Non-fictional prose of the victorian age.

Victorian literature is characterized by its abundance in the field of non-fictional prose, the range of variety of which is baffling. Non-fictional prose writers of this period explore a fine art of living while simultaneously carrying the message of immediate public concern. They focused on society while also encompassing within its realm, theology, histories, scientific endeavors, biographies, ethical and philosophical treatises, literary and art criticisms and so on.

Thomas Carlyle is undoubtedly one of the most important literary figures of the Victorian Age. His major historical works are The French Revolution , a series of vivid word-pictures full of audacity and color, rather than sober history; Oliver Cromwell's Letter's and Speeches , a huge effort relieved from tedium only by Carlyle's volcanic methods; the genial and humane Life of John Sterling and The History of Frederich II of Prussia which was enormous in scale and heavy with detail. His works dealing with contemporary events include Chartism , Past and Present and Latter-day Pamphlets . The series of lectures that he delivered in 1837 was published as On heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History . Carlyle's method was essentially biographical and his aim was to make History alive by means of his masculine imagination and pithy style.

After Carlyle the next great Victorian non-fictional prose writer is John Ruskin who wrote remarkably on art and the social and economic questions of his time in a style that was delicate, graceful and almost lyrical. His Modern Painters was a defence of Turner's paintings whereas The Stones of Venice , which is his masterpiece in thought and style, was written in appraisal of the Gothic style of Art. Ruskin's Unto This Last and Munera Pulveris comprises of a series of articles on political economy. His other important works are Sesame and Lilies and Two Paths which are a course of lectures and The Crown of Wild Olives which comprises of a series of addresses.

The noted Victorian poet, Mathew Arnold also holds his place in English Literature as a tireless critic. His most renowned work Essays in Criticism where he criticized Shelley's poetic circle is marked by wide reading and careful thought. His Culture and Anarchy and Friendship's Garland aimed at broadening the mental and moral horizon of the English people; whereas his Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible undertook the task of reconstructing Christianity on grounds of naturalism. Arnold's writing style is typically elegant and for multiple reasons he is acclaimed as a prophetic critic.

Thomas Babington Macaulay contributed five biographies for Encyclopaedia Britannica. His essays dealt with either literary subjects like Milton, Byron, Bunyan etc or historical studies including his famous compositions on Warren Hastings and Lord Clive. His opinions were often one sided, and his knowledge was often flawed with actual error or distorted by his craving for antithesis, but his essays are clearly and ably written and disclose an eye for picturesque effect. His History of England remained unfinished with four volumes of the book completed during his lifetime. His treatment of history is marked by picturesque details, desire for brilliant effect which resulted in a hard, self confident manner and in a lack of broader outlines and deeper views.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a moral essayist whose eleven volumes of lectures and essays cover a wide range of subjects which chiefly deal with the conduct of life.

Walter Pater (1839-94) is known both as a stylist and a literary critic. He devoted himself to art and literature producing some remarkable volumes on these subjects. The collection of his first essays appeared as Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). The essays were chiefly concerned with art. Imaginary Portraits (1887) deals with artists and Appreciations (1889) is on literary themes with an introductory essay on style. Pater was a representative of the school of aesthetic criticism. He was a strong believer of the theory of art for art’s sake. He focused his attention always on form rather than subject matter. His own style is among the most notable of the Victorian prose writers. It is the creation of immense application and forethought; every word is conned, every sentence proved and every rhythm appraised. It is never cheap, but firm and equable.

Symonds who was also among forerunner of literary critics wrote Studies of the Greek Poets and his master-piece The Renaissance in Italy in which he contests Ruskin's views on art. Mention must be made of the historians Henry Thomas Buckle, who wrote History of Civilization in England and Edward Augustus Freeman who gave us the very valuable History of Norman Conquest . John Richard Greene's A short History of the English People took the rank of a text-book which was also literature. Essays were also written on scientific subjects. Charles Darwin's ground-breaking On the Origin of species and The Descent of Man and Thomas Henry Huxley's Man's Place in Nature are notable for their masterly gifts of exposition and argument.

Thus it can be very justifiably concluded that Victorian non-fictional prose was varied as well as useful, interesting as well as edifying in what they offered to the diligent readers.

Fictional And Non Fictional Prose In Literature

“Fiction” refers to literature. Mysteries, science fiction, romance, fairy tales, enlightened chickens, criminal thrills are all kinds of fiction.

“Non-fiction” refers to books based on fact. It is a very broad category of literature. The Department of Excellence has books and videos in many categories including biography, business, cooking, health and fitness, pets, art, home decoration, languages, travel, home improvement, religion, arts and music, history, self-help, true crime, science and comedy.

Prose is a type of language that does not have an official metrics structure. It uses the flow of speech naturally, as well as the general structure of the system, rather than the rhythm structure, as in traditional poetry.

Other common types of Prose:

1. Nonfictional Prose : A literary work that is very much based on fact, or may contain fiction in certain contexts. Examples include biographies and essays.

2. Fiction : A well-thought-out or partial literary or theoretical work. Examples are novels.

3. Prosic Heroic : A literary work that can be written or read, and that uses many word formulas found in oral practice. Examples are myths and legends.

4. Prose Poetry : A literary work that reflects the quality of poetry – using emotional effects and enhanced drawings – but written in prose instead of a verse.

Fictional vs Non-Fictional Prose

Fiction refers to the structure, settings, and characters created from imagination, while Non-Fiction refers to real-life stories centered on real events and people. However, the difference between the two is sometimes blurred, as is often the case. it is important to know that both fiction and non-fiction can be used in any way (film, television, games, etc.).

The legend is fiction and is based on the imagination of the author. Short stories, novels, myths, legends and myths are all considered myths. Legends often use certain narrative techniques to increase their impact.

Non-fiction, on the other hand, is true and reports on real events. Histories, biographies, journalism, and essays are all considered fiction. In general, non-fiction has a higher degree of adherence than fiction. Just remember this, that if it reports the truth, it is not true. If the truth is simple, it is a myth.

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A Culture Warrior Takes a Late Swing

The editor and essayist Joseph Epstein looks back on his life and career in two new books.

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By Dwight Garner

NEVER SAY YOU’VE HAD A LUCKY LIFE: Especially If You’ve Had a Lucky Life , by Joseph Epstein

FAMILIARITY BREEDS CONTENT: New and Selected Essays , by Joseph Epstein

When Tammy Wynette was asked to write a memoir in her mid-30s, she initially declined, she said in an interview, because “I didn’t think my life was over yet.” The publisher responded: Has it occurred to you that in 15 years no one might care? She wrote the book. “Stand by Your Man: An Autobiography” (1979) was a hit.

The essayist and editor Joseph Epstein — whose memoir “Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life,” is out now, alongside a greatest-hits collection titled “Familiarity Breeds Content” — has probably never heard Wynette sing except by accident. (In a 1993 essay, he wrote that he wished he didn’t know who Willie Nelson was, because it was a sign of a compromised intellect.) But his memoir illustrates another reason not to wait too long to commit your life to print.

There is no indication that Epstein, who is in his late 80s, has lost a step. His prose is as genial and bland, if comparison to his earlier work is any indication, as it ever was. But there’s a softness to his memories of people, perhaps because it was all so long ago. This is the sort of memoir that insists someone was funny, or erudite, or charismatic, while rarely providing the crucial details.

Epstein aw-shucks his way into “Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life” — pretending to be self-effacing while not being so in the least is one of his salient qualities as a writer — by warning readers, “I may not have had a sufficiently interesting life to merit an autobiography.” This is because he “did little, saw nothing notably historic, and endured not much out of the ordinary of anguish or trouble or exaltation.” Quickly, however, he concludes that his life is indeed worth relating, in part because “over the years I have acquired the literary skill to recount that life well.”

Here he is wrong in both directions. His story is interesting enough to warrant this memoir. His personal life has taken complicated turns. And as the longtime editor of the quarterly magazine The American Scholar, and a notably literate conservative culture warrior, he’s been in the thick of things.

He does lack the skill to tell his own story, though, if by “skill” we mean not well-scrubbed Strunk and White sentences but close and penetrating observation. Epstein favors tasseled loafers and bow ties, and most of his sentences read as if they were written by a sentient tasseled loafer and edited by a sentient bow tie.

He grew up in Chicago, where his father manufactured costume jewelry. The young Epstein was popular and, in high school, lettered in tennis. His title refers to being lucky, and a big part of that luck, in his estimation, was to grow up back when kids could be kids, before “the therapeutic culture” took over.

This complaint sets the tone of the book. His own story is set next to a rolling series of cultural grievances. He’s against casual dress, the prohibition of the word “Negro,” grade inflation, the Beat Generation, most of what occurred during the 1960s, standards slipping everywhere, de-Westernizing college curriculums, D.E.I. programs, you name it. His politics aren’t the problem. We can argue about those. American culture needs more well-read conservatives. The problem is that in his search for teachable moments, his memoir acquires the cardboard tone of a middling opinion column.

His youth was not all tennis lessons and root beer floats. He and his friends regularly visited brothels because, he writes, sex was not as easy to come by in the 1950s. He was kicked out of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for his role in the selling of a stolen accounting exam to other students.

He was lucky to find a place at the University of Chicago, a place of high seriousness. The school changed him. He began to reassess his values. He began to read writers like Irving Howe, Sidney Hook, Midge Decter and Norman Podhoretz, and felt his politics pull to the right.

After college, he was drafted into the Army and ended up in Little Rock, Ark., where he met his first wife. At the time, she was a waitress at a bar and restaurant called the Gar Hole. Here Epstein’s memoir briefly threatens to acquire genuine weight.

She had lost custody of her two sons after a divorce. Together they got them back, and she and Epstein had two sons of their own. After their divorce, Epstein took all four of the boys. This is grist for an entire memoir, but Epstein passes over it quickly. One never gets much of a sense of what his boys were like, or what it was like to raise them. He later tells us that he has all but lost touch with his stepsons and has not seen them for decades.

He worked for the magazine The New Leader and the Encyclopaedia Britannica before becoming the editor of The American Scholar in 1975. It was a position he would hold for 22 years. He also taught at Northwestern University for nearly three decades.

At The American Scholar he began to write a long personal essay in each issue, under the pseudonym Aristides. He wrote 92 of these, on topics such as smoking and envy and reading and height. Most ran to 6,500 words, or about 4,000 words longer than they should have been.

Many magazine editors like to write every so often, to keep a hand in. But there is something unseemly about an editor chewing up acres of space in his own publication on a regular basis. Editorially, it’s a droit du seigneur imposition.

A selection of these essays, as well as some new ones, can now be found in “Familiarity Breeds Content.” In his introduction to this book, Christopher Buckley overpraises Epstein, leaving the reader no choice but to start mentally pushing back.

Buckley calls Epstein “the most entertaining living essayist in the English language.” (Not while Michael Kinsley, Lorrie Moore, Calvin Trillin, Sloane Crosley and Geoff Dyer, among many others, walk the earth.) He repurposes Martin Amis’s comment about Saul Bellow: “One doesn’t read Saul Bellow. One can only reread him.” To this he adds, “Ditto Epstein.” (Epstein is no Saul Bellow.) Buckley says, “Joe Epstein is incapable of writing a boring sentence.”

Well. How about this one, from an essay about cats?

A cat, I realize, cannot be everyone’s cup of fur.

Or this one, from an essay about sports and other obsessions:

I have been told there are people who wig out on pasta.

Or this one, about … guess:

When I was a boy, it occurs to me now, I always had one or another kind of hat.

Juggling today appears to be undergoing a small renaissance.

If one is looking to save on fuel bills, politics is likely to heat up a room quicker than just about anything else.

In tennis I was most notable for flipping and catching my racket in various snappy routines.

The essays are, by and large, as tweedy and self-satisfied as these lines make them sound. There are no wild hairs in them, no sudden deepenings of tone. Nothing is at stake. We are stranded with him on the putt-putt course.

Epstein fills his essays with quotation after quotation, as ballast. I am a fan of well-deployed, free-range quotations. So many of Epstein’s are musty and reek of Bartlett’s. They are from figures like Lord Chesterfield and Lady Mary Montagu and Sir Herbert Grierson and Tocqueville and Walpole and Carlyle. You can feel the moths escaping from the display case in real time.

To be fair, I circled a few sentences in “Familiarity Breeds Content” happily. I’m with him on his distrust of “fun couples.” He writes, “A cowboy without a hat is suitable only for bartending.” I liked his observation, which he borrowed from someone else, that a career has five stages:

(1) Who is Joseph Epstein? (2) Get me Joseph Epstein. (3) We need someone like Joseph Epstein. (4) What we need is a young Joseph Epstein. (5) Who is Joseph Epstein?

It’s no fun to trip up a writer on what might have been a late-career victory lap. Epstein doesn’t need me to like his work. He’s published more than 30 books, and you can’t do that unless you’ve made a lot of readers happy.

NEVER SAY YOU’VE HAD A LUCKY LIFE : Especially If You’ve Had a Lucky Life | By Joseph Epstein | Free Press | 287 pp. | $29.99

FAMILIARITY BREEDS CONTENT : New and Selected Essays | By Joseph Epstein | Simon & Schuster | 441 pp. | Paperback, $20.99

Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade. More about Dwight Garner

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