Regan submitted a 2,200-word 2,200-wordhe-doth-protest-too-much essay to the New York Times.
Their words are echoed by Seamus Heaney in his much later essay "The Impact of Translation".
"My Brooklyn," Kelly Anderson's sensitive study of gentrification in her home borough, is as much personal essay as urban-policy survey.
In 2000, Cheryll Barron, a past Silicon Valley correspondent for the Economist and Business Week, wrote a much quoted essay on salon.com called 'High-tech's missionaries of sloppiness'.
He reminds the editor now, addressing him directly (behind him, twilight has descended in the garden), that in his student days he once wrote a much praised essay on the coded language of the disenfranchised.
In a much translated essay of 1942, the French philosopher Albert Camus caused many people to re-imagine the seemingly sad fate of the deceitful Sisyphus, punished by the gods for his deceit and avarice.
Last December in these pages, the editor and critic Paul Elie wrote a much discussed essay about the relative absence of Christian belief as a theme among today's mainstream literary novelists.
Gessen's short story "The Vice President's Daughter" is as much an essay on the delusions and smashed hopes of Clinton-era college students as it is a work of fiction.
"White Man, What Now?" a much circulated essay by the well-regarded German novelist Matthias Politycki contrasts the overwhelming vitality, religious and physical as well as economic, of Asians and Africans with anaemic Europeans.
In the twenties, he earned about twenty-four thousand dollars a year, the equivalent of about three hundred thousand now, though in those days, as in these, that did not feel like a lot of money to a writer trying to live among people who really did have a lot of money (as Fitzgerald demonstrated in his charming, much resented essay "How to Live on $36,000 a Year").
The piece titled "Help Me Not Be a Human Being" is not so much an essay as a list of emotional disasters, each punctuated by the phrase "a love story" to prove it was anything but: "That's not the clitoris: a love story"; "Let's pretend you are capable of being who I think you need to be: a love story".
