French · b. 1533
Michel de Montaigne was a French Renaissance thinker who effectively invented the essay as a literary form, author of the wise, candid, and endlessly searching Essays.
Michel de Montaigne retired from public life to his tower library, where he began writing the reflective, exploratory pieces he called essais — “attempts” — inventing a new literary form in the process.
His Essays, published from 1580, range across an astonishing variety of subjects — friendship, fear, education, death, cannibals, the body — always returning to his central question, “What do I know?” Candid, digressive, skeptical, and humane, they offer one of literature’s most intimate and enduring self-portraits.
Montaigne is celebrated as the father of the essay and one of the wisest and most companionable of writers, whose self-examination still speaks directly to readers four centuries later.
by Michel de Montaigne
Montaigne retired to his tower in 1571 and spent the next twenty years writing essays — a form he essentially invented — on subjects ranging from cannibals to friendship, cruelty to experience. The subject of every essay, regardless of its nominal topic, is Montaigne himself: how he thinks, what he knows, what he doubts.
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