Portrait of Michel de Montaigne. via Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Penguin Classics
The Complete Essays
The invention of the essay, and of thinking in public.
$25.00
Available · worldwide delivery
- Author
- Michel de Montaigne; trans. M.A. Screech
- Publisher
- Penguin Classics
- Published
- January 1993
- Pages
- 0
- Format
- Paperback
- Size
- Standard
- Language
- English
The Library Essay
One Man Honestly Described Is Everyone
Michel de Montaigne retired to the tower of his family estate in 1571, aged thirty-eight, and began writing trials, essais, of his own judgement on whatever presented itself, cannibals, thumbs, cruelty, friendship, the education of children, his own kidney stones. In doing so he invented the essay, and something larger, the practice of studying one particular self without apology as the nearest available specimen of mankind.
He revised and enlarged the book until his death in 1592, and it has been in print ever since, consulted like a sensible friend by readers from Shakespeare's generation onward. M. A. Screech's Penguin Classics translation of 1991 presents the complete essays with the scholarship worn lightly, in an English as companionable as the original.
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