“An 1833 review of the only book of poetry Hartley Coleridge published in his lifetime praised the verse for embodying ‘no trivial inheritance of his father's genius,’ but also observed, ‘It is an old saying that the oakling withers beneath the shadow of the oak.’ I have long been interested in what makes some oaklings thrive and others wither, because, in a minor way, I’m an oakling myself. My father was a critic and an essayist. My mother was a war correspondent. The upside of this print-smudged parentage was that I was raised in a home with seven thousand books, plenty of literary conversation, and empirical evidence that writing was something you could actually do for a living."

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with essayist Anne Fadiman about the history of the essay since Montaigne and the art of making essays out of history; about teaching essay-writing to college students; and about what Virginia Woolf called “the Common Reader.” The conversation addresses the title essay—about a pet frog named Bunky—of Fadiman’s new collection, Frog and Other Essays, but Hohn and Fadiman spend the most time with two other essays—one that originally appeared in the Family issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, on poet and essayist Hartley Coleridge, who grew up in the shadow of his famous father, Samuel Taylor, and one first published in the Harvard Review, about the South Polar Times, a magazine whose editors, contributors, and original readers were all members of the polar expeditions led by Robert Falcon Scott.

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Anne Fadiman on Essays, Personal and Historical