Abstract
In the late sixteenth century, Montaigne attempts to express the changing and vertiginous reality of his time (discovery of America, Copernican revolution, wars of religion, etc.) through a new expressive and communicative artifact that will be named “essay”. It will be the most representative of modern thought vehicle, in contrast to the scholastic tractatus, summa or relectio. In the twentieth century, due to the consolidation of the social sciences and the transformation of philosophy in hermeneutics, the legacy of the founding or original essay of Montaigne often moves into journalistic writing. Zweig, Kapuscinski and Pla, among many others, assumed that inheritance in an explicit way.
