Notes on Beautiful Nonfiction

30 Mar, 2026

Like most people, when I think of examples of beautiful prose, my mind goes to fiction and poetry.¹

But what about non-fiction? Are there writers of factual works whose prose goes above workmanlike? Fellow blogger Linch asked for recommendations on possible works to study on a technical level, and I spent a good portion of today pondering the question.

I can think of a handful of beautifully written autobiographies, such as Jeannette Walls' 2005 The Glass Castle. But I don't think this fits the spirit of the request, as autobiographies and other beautiful diaryposts (e.g. Roger Angell's This Old Man for the New Yorker) are doing something different than bloggers — such that I imagine it's not much more useful to study them versus studying works of fiction or poetry.

So let's think about essayists, specifically. This has its own challenges; there are works of non-fiction that introduce you to such marvelous and/or heartbreaking things about the world that it's hard to look past the, like, ecstasies of revelation to realize that the actual sentences are sort of mid. On the other hand, there are works of non-fiction that are beautifully written but say nothing of actual substance. When I peruse my bookshelf for ~contemporary essayists that manage to land in that upper right quadrant, saying interesting, meaningful things using beautiful language, I do come up fairly short! In fact, I can think of just three that I am familiar enough with to confidently recommend.²

David Foster Wallace

First is my favourite nonfiction writer of all time, David Foster Wallace. For people who are familiar with Scott Alexander, I'd characterize Wallace as having lots of Scott Alexander vibes — the humour, the irony, the very idiosyncratic subject matter discoursed upon at length — but more sensorily observant and willing to talk to the people around him for pull quotes (he's a reporter with a reporter badge). Really, since Wallace came first, it's really Alexander who has Wallace vibes, not the other way around. I can happily slonk down all three of his major essay collections over a weekend, though I have failed half a dozen times to make it past the first fifty pages of Infinite Jest.³ Try A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Big Red Son, and Federer Both Flesh and Not, the last of which is an essay I frequently use to explain why pickleball is a good sport. From Wallace:

This thing about the ball cooperatively hanging there, slowing down, as if susceptible to the Swiss’s will — there’s real metaphysical truth here. And in the following anecdote. After a July 7 semifinal in which Federer destroyed Jonas Bjorkman — not just beat him, destroyed him — and just before a requisite post-match news conference in which Bjorkman, who’s friendly with Federer, says he was pleased to “have the best seat in the house” to watch the Swiss “play the nearest to perfection you can play tennis,” Federer and Bjorkman are chatting and joking around, and Bjorkman asks him just how unnaturally big the ball was looking to him out there, and Federer confirms that it was “like a bowling ball or basketball.” He means it just as a bantery, modest way to make Bjorkman feel better, to confirm that he’s surprised by how unusually well he played today; but he’s also revealing something about what tennis is like for him. Imagine that you’re a person with preternaturally good reflexes and coordination and speed, and that you’re playing high-level tennis. Your experience, in play, will not be that you possess phenomenal reflexes and speed; rather, it will seem to you that the tennis ball is quite large and slow-moving, and that you always have plenty of time to hit it.

The thing that is good about pickleball is that it makes every player into Roger Federer, and being Roger Federer is a great deal of fun.⁴ And the thing I am most jealous of is Wallace's ability to write hundred-word sentences that don't sound like run-on sentences at all. How does he do that? Is it using a couple different ways of breaking the sentence up (commas, em-dashes, quotations), the almost-conversational cadence, or the rhythm that gets built by long/short/long/short segments (if that's actually distinct from having an almost-conversational cadence) — or is it a combination of all of the above? That previous sentence was forty-nine words and I fear going further. What the hell is Wallace doing?

George Orwell

While Wallace is evidently an enjoyer of gardenesque sentences, Orwell (also sadly more known for his fiction than his essays) is the opposite. He writes with remarkable clarity (and has written the excellent Politics and the English Language about this). His writing runs the gamut from fiction which I don't care for, to autobiographical works that I adore, to essays that are not as good as e.g. his autobiographical Down and Out In Paris and London, but are nevertheless very good and extremely underrated! In addition to Politics and the English Language, I'd recommend checking out The Lion and the Unicorn, and his review of Mein Kampf. My favourite essay is actually A Hanging, but that one is ~autobiographical.

One thing I admire about Orwell's essays is his ability to write from a specific viewpoint without it seeming overwrought or ideological, which is kind of ironic considering like, 1984 and Animal Farm:

When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air. Even in the first few minutes dozens of small things conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant. The crowds in the big towns, with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, are different from a European crowd. Then the vastness of England swallows you up, and you lose for a while your feeling that the whole nation has a single identifiable character. Are there really such things as nations? Are we not forty-six million individuals, all different? And the diversity of it, the chaos! The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning – all these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene. How can one make a pattern out of this muddle?

But talk to foreigners, read foreign books or newspapers, and you are brought back to the same thought. Yes, there is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own. Moreover it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature. What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.

This passage is very like, English toff who went to Eton in one way; there's a real rhetorician's flair to them what with all the anaphoras and tricolons. But there's an affectionate warmth under all of it too, clearly borne from close observation — an affection that no public school can teach you.

Dammit, why can't all socialists write like this. If they did we'd probably all be living under socialism today :'(

Wendell Berry

Berry writes prose and argumentation so gorgeous he has me nodding along to things I have no business nodding along to, such as the need for everyone to move from The Big City back to their ancestral family farms and grow organic tobacco there and practice abstinence as birth control under the light of god. You should definitely read him, but you have to promise not to get got and buy an organic farm in rural Kentucky about it. I recommend the essay collection The Art of the Commonplace, which is about how to organize a society. From Two Economies:

Some time ago, in a conversation with Wes Jackson in which we were laboring to define the causes of the modern ruination of farmland, we finally got around to the money economy. I said that an economy based on energy would be more benign because it would be more comprehensive.

Wes would not agree. “An energy economy still wouldn’t be comprehensive enough.”

“Well,” I said, “then what kind of economy would be comprehensive enough?”

He hesitated a moment, and then, grinning, said, “The Kingdom of God.”

I assume that Wes used the term because he found it, at that point in our conversation, indispensable; I assume so because, in my pondering over its occurrence at that point, I have found it indispensable myself. For the thing that troubles us about the industrial economy is exactly that it is not comprehensive enough, that, moreover, it tends to destroy what it does not comprehend, and that it is dependent upon much that it does not comprehend. In attempting to criticize such an economy, we naturally pose against it an economy that does not leave anything out, and we can say without presuming too much that the first principle of the Kingdom of God is that it includes everything; in it, the fall of every sparrow is a significant event.

There's definitely a down-to-earth affability about him at his best, and he's charmingly wont to cite scripture at a drop of a hat, but like a poet decorating his language rather than like an academic or a pastor. (He frequently quotes poetry too, mostly his own.)

Many internet writers employ a form of playing with registers, going from serious to lax and back again. I think Berry does something a little more powerful; he almost seems to have willed into existence a world where there are no differentiating registers at all. Isn't it the most natural thing in the world for a tobacco farmer to discuss the shortfalls of the field of economics via biblical analogies?

Sadly, he's settled into an unpleasant crankdom in old age and the convivial joy that suffuses his earlier works has been replaced with bitterness.

All the more reason for us to start writing relatively early in life, I suppose.

#longform #notes