A reader suggested I create a meta-list of the best essays of all time, so I did. I found over 12 best essays lists and several essay anthologies and combined the essays into one meta-list. The meta-list below includes every essay that was on at least two of the original source lists. They are organized chronologically, by date of publication. For the same list organized by rank, that is, with the essays on the most lists at the top, go HERE.
Note 1: Some of the essays are actually chapters from books. In such cases, I have identified the source book.
Note 2: Some of the essays are book-length, such as Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. One book listed as an essay by two listers – Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet – is also regularly categorized as a work of fiction.
11th Century
Sei Shonagon – Hateful Things (from The Pillow Book) (1002) (on 2 lists)
14th Century
Yoshida Kenko – Essays in Idleness (1332) (on 2 lists)
16th Century
Michel de Montaigne – On Some Verses of Virgil (1580) (on 2 lists)
17th Century
Robert Burton – Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) (on 2 lists)
John Milton – Areopagitica (1644) (on 2 lists)
18th Century
Jonathan Swift – A Modest Proposal (1729) (on 3 lists)
19th Century
William Hazlitt – On Going a Journey (1822) (on 2 lists)
Charles Lamb – The Superannuated Man (1823) (on 2 lists)
William Hazlitt – On the Pleasure of Hating (1823) (on 4 lists)
Ralph Waldo Emerson – Self-Reliance (1841) (on 4 lists)
Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience (1849) (on 2 lists)
Henry David Thoreau – Where I Lived, and What I Lived For (from Walden) (1854) (on 2 lists)Henry David Thoreau – Economy (from Walden) (1854) (on 2 lists)
Henry David Thoreau – Walking (1861) (on 2 lists)
Robert Louis Stevenson – The Lantern-Bearers (1888) (on 2 lists)
20th Century
Zora Neale Hurston – How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928) (on 2 lists)
Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own (1928) (on 4 lists)
Virginia Woolf – Street Haunting: A London Adventure (1930) (on 3 lists)
George Orwell – A Hanging (1931) (on 2 lists)
Junichiro Tanizaki – In Praise of Shadows (1933) (on 2 lists)
Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet (1935) (on 2 lists)
George Orwell – Shooting an Elephant (1936) (on 6 lists)
E.B. White – Once More to the Lake (1941) (on 6 lists)
James Agee and Walker Evans – Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) (on 2 lists)
Virginia Woolf – The Death of a Moth (1942) (on 4 lists)
Simone Weil – On Human Personality (1943) (on 2 lists)
M.F.K. Fisher – The Flaw (1943) (on 2 lists)
Vladimir Nabokov – Speak, Memory (1951, revised 1966) (on 2 lists)
George Orwell – Such, Such Were the Joys (1952) (on 4 lists)
Mary McCarthy – Artists in Uniform: A Story (1953) (on 2 lists)
James Baldwin – Notes of a Native Son (1955) (on 11 lists)
E.B. White – Goodbye to Forty-Eighth Street (1957) (on 2 lists)
Martin Luther King, Jr. – Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963) (on 2 lists)
Joseph Mitchell – Joe Gould’s Secret (1964) (on 2 lists)
Susan Sontag – Against Interpretation (1966) (on 2 lists)
Joan Didion – Goodbye To All That (1968) (on 6 lists)
Joan Didion – On Keeping A Notebook (1968) (on 5 lists)
Joan Didion – In Bed (1968) (on 4 lists)
Edward Hoagland – The Courage of Turtles (1970) (on 2 lists)
John McPhee – The Search for Marvin Gardens (1972) (on 3 lists)
Annie Dillard – Seeing (from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek) (1974) (on 2 lists)
Maxine Hong Kingston – No Name Woman (from The Woman Warrior) (1976) (on 2 lists)
Joan Didion – The White Album (1968-1978) (on 3 lists)
Eudora Welty – The Little Store (1978) (on 3 lists)
Annie Dillard – Total Eclipse (1982) (on 5 lists)
Annie Dillard – Living Like Weasels (1982) (on 2 lists)
Roland Barthes – Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1982) (on 2 lists)
Gloria E. Anzaldúa – How to Tame a Wild Tongue (1987) (on 2 lists)
Italo Calvino – Exactitude (1988) (on 2 lists)
Phillip Lopate – Against Joie de Vivre (1989) (on 3 lists)
Richard Rodriguez – Late Victorians (1990) (on 2 lists)
Amy Tan – Mother Tongue (1991) (on 4 lists)
Seymour Krim – To My Brothers & Sisters in the Failure Business (1991) (on 2 lists)
David Wojnarowicz – Being Queer in America: A Journal of Disintegration (1991) (on 2 lists)
Anne Carson – The Anthropology of Water (1995) (on 2 lists)
Jo Ann Beard – The Fourth State of Matter (1996) (on 5 lists)
David Foster Wallace – A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again (1996) (on 5 lists)
21st Century
Susan Sontag – Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) (on 2 lists)
David Foster Wallace – Consider The Lobster (2005) (on 4 lists)
Etel Adnan – In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005) (on 2 lists)
Paul LaFarge – Destroy All Monsters (2006) (on 2 lists)
Brian Doyle – Joyas Voladoras (2012) (on 2 lists)