Ralphie Waldo Emerson...along with Michel de Montaigne make great reading companions, esp. on cold and dreary winter like these....who are some current writers- essayists in particular- that you find mentally satisfying?

Would Maya Angelou count as an essayist?
If she does, she is the most mentally satisfying modern essayist I can think of. I enjoy reading excerpts from her works, but I regret to say, I haven't read many of her compositions.

Oscar Wilde - I'm actually suprised nobody brought him up earlier!!
Wilde had a habit of going against the grain of contemporary thought in his day (and, to some extent, even to modern schools-of-thought). Therefore, even if you do not agree with what he says, it at least explores options largely left alone. That's my opinion, anyway...

Among the great essayists of the nineteenth century is Robert Louis Stevenson, best known for "Treasure Island" and "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"; he also wrote poems and stories. In the Top Ten of my all-time favorite essays is his "The Lantern Bearers", a beautifully written argument for romantic over realistic literature. Other essayists include Thoreau, Melville, who wrote "Hawthorne and his Mosses" in appreciation of his friend, Father Brown creator G.K. Chesterton, who put his paradoxical bent into many an essay, including "On Running After One's Hat"(!), Mencken and E.B. White, whose "Here Is New York" is required reading for anyone interested in the Big Apple. tjoeb};>

If Julian Barnes' "Letters from London" can qualify as "essays" then they would be my choice for a good description of the early nineties in Britain.
(How do you 'define' the term essay? - Were Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes essays or letters ? )
And what about Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands ?
Is Colin Wilson's The Outsider an essay? If so it certainly was an influential one.

[ 01-10-2002: Message edited by: flem ]

William Hazlitt above all for his insight, acerbity, and literally perfect prose and Somerset Maugham's essays becuase they are a little like Hazlitt's. Gore Vidal as an essayist is in the same league, although I never much liked his novels. Barry Lopez, because he treads that line between essay and fiction and his work is simply magnificent. Flem, if you haven't read Lopez you really should. His work is a magical interplay of US history and the land and you would understand him immediately.

Well what I found on the web concerning Lopez and about "Desert Notes"," Of Wolves and Men", "Arctic Dreams"
really strengthened me in my impression that the USA-"history" that 'tempts' me is really that sort of more complete view of events in which Man and Nature do not get separated from each other if you see what I mean.
It always has seemed strange to me that Europeans tend to associate USA with such silly symbols of 'man-made' history as Coca Cola, Big Mac and even skyscrapers.
Even the movie industry has at times been able to seize some of the "space" and the "natural life" aspects of the U.S.A.("Zabriskie Point"; but also some sequences from "Easy Rider") and as far as I know National Geographic too tries to develop that eye for the life that's bigger than our myopic daily business concerns.
Of course I now should read some of Lopez's essays, but the introductions to him I found on the web, point to the sort of sensation I until now only had in the lonelier stretches of Ireland and the Scottish Highlands. Guess you might have them in Norway too. The sort of environment that downsizes humans to what they really are: ants scurrying about on the upper crust of a Blue Planet that can only be understood in terms of amazement rather than of calculating science.
But such amazement becomes cheap when it is not combined with keen observation.
"Essays" or attempts to understand the fullness of life without waxing too "poetic", certainly qualify as true literature and it matters very little that the booksellers often don't know whether to put them on the fiction-shelves or on the non-fiction ones.
Moreover the sharp observation of what overawes us is in my view a more "religious" experience than a lot of Bible-thumping that is going on, if I am allowed to say so (without being banished to the Controversial Issues thread ).
A question though: where do you situate Thoreau in relation to somebody like Barry Lopez?
By the way ..if you include Hazlitt why shouldn't you include Coleridge as well ??
And another question :Where does a Study of a Subject become An Essay? E.g. :is Linda Kaufman's Bad Girls and Sick Boys a study of phenomena in modern art or is it an essay??

Hmmm. So many questions, so little time. First off, Winter Dreams would be a good start, although all of his work is stunning. I gave 'Buffalo', a story/essay from that collection to my students last year and only one was enchanted. The vast majority of them met the work with what could only be termed bewildered indifference and two or three were outright indignant because, as they cogently argued, "buffalo don't sing."
What you sense about landscape, history and people and what Lopez writes are one and the same. Read him NOW! You need to.
Lopez is hard to categorize and your question about studies and essays applies here. I suppose an essay could be seen as an intellectual prose poem developed from a study that is recollected in tranquility, along the lines of the Wordsworth dictum. Although most of the classic essayists are in some way linear, Lopez writes vertically, weaving seamlessly among states that include time, humans, animals and land. The Russian poet Lebed'ev is a little like him. I am not sure about Thoreau because I haven't read enough of him. I think it probable that there is a connection, but I simply don't know.

I didn't include Coleridge becuase he isn't anything like Hazlitt. Actually, it was Coleridge who introduced Hazlitt to literature and literary endeavour, and Hazlitt's essay 'On My First Acquaintence With Poets' tells the story of their early friendship. At one point Hazlitt observed that watching Coleridge walk was like charting the way he thought - the poet was incapable for one minute of sticking to the path and would stop, go forward and then back and meander across from one side to the other. Hazlitt always went straight from point A to point B.
Coleridge was a professional Romantic and very conscious of his position as leader of a movement. Hazlitt was not interested in Romanticism per se and what he was interested in was the development of an idea and the building of that idea through a series of associations, a 'train of thought', which is a term I believe he coined. More like Proust in a way. 'The Indian Jugglers' is one prime example of this, or 'On a Sundial'. Now I can think of a million of them, but those are easy to come by because they are famous and in almost every anthology.
Hazlitt was a great critic and too acerbic ever to follow anyone's lead and Wordsworth and Coleridge both ended up really getting on his nerves (as did almost everyone else). However for the greatest human honesty I will probably ever read, the funniest bon mots, and the most breathtaking prose style imaginable, he's the one. Charles Lamb's essays are more like his although he too was a great individualist.I guess I'd better stop here or I'll go on rambling all night. Don't forget Lopez, though.