Essayist
Explore 4 of history's most influential essayist, ranked by historical influence. Each figure links to a full biography, feats, trivia and similar people.
Virginia Woolf
81Virginia Woolf was an English writer, a central figure of literary modernism, whose novels Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse pioneered stream of consciousness, and whose essay A Room of One's Own became a landmark of feminist thought.
Jorge Luis Borges
80Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentine writer whose brief, dazzling stories of labyrinths, infinite libraries and mirrored worlds made him one of the most influential figures in 20th-century literature and a master of modern short fiction.
Michel de Montaigne
80Michel de Montaigne was a French Renaissance thinker and nobleman who invented the essay as a literary form, using candid self-examination to explore the human condition with unmatched honesty and wit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
80Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement and, through works such as "Self-Reliance" and "Nature", shaped American thought and called a new national literature into being.