This unorthodox but delightful anthology of 42 essays focuses on the masters of world literature--writers best known for novels, plays, and poems--and how they put the essay to their personal use. Contributors include Auden, Balzac, Conrad, Dickens, Dostoevski, Eliot, Faulkner, Flaubert, Gide, Goethe, Hardy, Hawthorne, Heine, Hemingway, Kafka, Kipling, Lawrence, Melville, Pirandello, Poe, Proust, Sartre, Tolstoy, Twain, Whitman, Wilde, Woolf, and Yeats.