I’d never heard of this Epstein fellow (which is, no doubt, a flaw in myself, rather than in him), but it does make one wonder which, if any essayists, will be remembered a century from now.

Michel de Montaigne seems timeless. Likewise, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau seem like they should have longevity.

Conversely though, it feels like Alan Mencken and Edmund Wilson are already fading.

And among today’s essayists, who will know the names ‘Christopher Hitchens’ and ‘Joan Didion’ in fifty years, except as historical curiosities (‘though little read today, Didion was a well known prose stylist in the late twentieth century, loved for her witty, though shallow analyses of the political mores of the day…’)? And in hundred or two hundred years? Will they be anything but ancient books to picked up at a flea market and then set down, never to be purchased nor read again?