Michel de Montaigne's Essays is the notable work by which his name has been catalogued and preserved in scholarly records, including the Library of Congress Name Authority File entry "Montaigne, Michel de, 1533-1592." The work stands as the single most-cited product of a career that encompassed an unusually broad range of occupations and drew on his use of French, Latin, and Italian.

Montaigne was born on the 10th of March, 1533, in Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne, a citizen of the Kingdom of France. His formal education took him first to the Collège de Guyenne and then to the University of Toulouse. Those years of schooling provided a foundation for a working life that proved wide in its range: Montaigne occupied himself at various points as a jurist, a politician, a translator, a poet, a prose writer, a philosopher, a moralist, and an autobiographer. His use of French, Latin, and Italian across his career reflects the multilingual formation visible in his educational background.

It was as an essayist that Montaigne produced the Essays, the work for which his name continues to be recorded and consulted. His occupations as philosopher, moralist, and autobiographer all find their expression within that single body of prose writing. The breadth of roles he carried throughout his life — from jurist and politician to poet and translator — shaped the range of a writer who worked in more than one language and across more than one mode of expression.

Montaigne died in Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne, the same place where he had been born, on either the 12th or the 13th of September, 1592 — the surviving records offer both dates. His life thus began and ended in the same location, and the Essays remained the work associated with his name as essayist, philosopher, and prose writer of the Kingdom of France.