He spent the rest of his adolescence on his own, in and out of the juvenile justice system, with what records show were “significant behavioral problems.” After the death of his adopted parents, he reportedly blew his $40,000 inheritance on drugs. By then, he was smoking pot, drinking booze and had been expelled several times since in the sixth grade. was adopted by a man and woman named Knott, who died in a plane crash when he was 15. The brothers apparently were separated from each other and moved through the foster system until Robert Jr. was about four, records show his mother shot and killed his father in front of him. She then gave birth to Robert Gerald Orr and another baby boy, whom she tried to care for while protecting herself from the abuse their father subjected her to. Kim and the Kardashian family continue to pay tribute to their patriarch on his birthday and anniversary of his death.ģ0, 2003 at age 59 after a battle with esophageal cancer.Home had a tenuous meaning for Knott, whose mother, Corabelle Young, had five young kids when she left with a man named Robert Orr, who wasn’t their father. Kim is even following in his footsteps, studying to become a lawyer. However, in an episode of KUWTK, she revealed that her dad discouraged her from practicing law. Robert famously assisted in the defense of O.J. Simpson during the former football player's murder trial. 'I have always been really fascinated by crime, true crime, the law,' Kim shared. 'I told my dad years ago that I was really into criminal justice and he was like, 'This will stress you out so much. You do not really want to take this on.'' 'But I think now, having gotten so deep in helping Alice, I'm really motivated to get to know the law more and fight for people that deserve a second chance like her,' Kim continued of Alice Marie Johnson, the former prisoner for whom she helped gain clemency.Anyone who has attempted to write about the essay knows how difficult the genre is to define. Yet essayists over the centuries have sought some sort of definition, despite the fact that the first modern essayist, Montaigne, the writer who gave the form its name, had the good sense to avoid defining the strange sort of prose he was in the process of inventing. I'm not saying that poetry, fiction, and drama are any easier to define than the essay. My point is simply that anyone writing about these forms, unless of course the goal is explicitly critical genre theory, will not feel under a similar obligation to propose definitions. So, what is it about essays in particular that makes us nervous?īefore I boldly and perhaps foolishly propose a definition of the essay, I want to explore why the form seems to demand one. The reasons are historical, critical, and educational. I'll begin with a brief examination of these, and then focus on the practical problems I face as the editor of the annual Best American Essays series and of numerous college anthologies that feature essays.įirst, the historical problem. As most readers know, the origin of the essay is usually traced to one writer, Montaigne, who began composing his peculiar prose pieces in the 1570s. In nearly all previous prose compositions, the act of writing remained in the background Montaigne is perhaps the first to foreground the writing process.Īt first, he has no literary category to describe what he is doing, nor does he appear to even possess conventional rhetorical aims. In his prose, he refused to adopt, as did his sixteenth-century contemporaries, a professional, scholarly, clerical, or judicial authority. He allowed himself no authoritative posture-only that of being an author.Īs his pieces accumulated, Montaigne settled on the word essai to characterize his literary efforts. The word was an ordinary term that at the time had no literary resonance. Like most common words it carried a broad range of connotations. The etymology of essai can be traced to the late Latin exagium, which meant 'to weigh' or 'a weight.' By the fourth century, the term had spread to the Romance languages with the additional and modern meaning of 'to attempt' or 'to try.' Though we normally translate the title of Montaigne's book as Essays, suggesting only the genre, we should remember that in his time the term suggested no literary genre and would be read as 'attempts' or 'trials,' or, since the verb essayer had a wide spectrum of synonyms, it could also suggest: to sample, taste, practice, take a risk, to experiment, to improvise, to try out, to sound-and these are only a few ways we might understand the term.

As Hugo Friedrich says in his splendid book on Montaigne, the word also implied modest beginnings and a learner's first attempts.

Robert knotes