The Modern Essay - The Essay In The Early Twentieth Century

THE ESSAY IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

Arthur Christopher Benson

SOURCE: "The Art of the Essayist," in Types and Times in the Essay, edited by Warner Taylor, Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1932, pp. 3-12.

[Benson was an English educator and author. Although he was a prolific poet, novelist, and biographer, he is best known for such volumes of essays as The Upton Letters (190S), From a College Window (1906), and Beside Still Waters (1907). In the following essay, Benson offers an overview of the characteristics of the essay form.]

There is a pleasant story of an itinerant sign-painter who in going his rounds came to a village inn upon whose signboard he had had his eye for some months and had watched with increasing hope and delight its rapid progress to blurred and faded dimness. To his horror he found a brand-new varnished sign. He surveyed it with disgust, and said to the inn-keeper, who stood nervously by...

[The entire page is 14634 words long]

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