Montaigne resists simple definitions. He
is the first essayist, a skeptic, an acute
student of himself and of man, a champion
of a man-based morality, a vivid and
charming stylist, and many other things
besides. No one description tells nearly
enough, and indeed it is hard to see which
one to place at the center. Yet this
very difficulty points to one answer: that
the book is the man. Montaigne's principal
conscious aim was to make it so. "I have
no more made my book than my book has made
me," he wrote.