De Botton has written in a variety of formats, and been met with mixed responses. Positive reviews of de Botton's books have claimed that he has made literature, philosophy and art more accessible to a wide audience. Negative reviews, however, have alleged that de Botton tends to state the obvious, and have characterized some of his books as pompous and lacking focus.
Essays
De Botton has written books of essays in which his own experiences and ideas are interwoven with those of artists, philosophers and thinkers. These have been called a "philosophy of everyday life."
Fiction
In his first novel,
Essays In Love (titled
On Love in the US), published in 1993, De Botton deals with the process of falling in and out of love. The style of the book is unusual because it mixes elements of a novel with reflections and analyses normally found in non-fiction. In 2010,
Essays in Love was adapted to film by director Julian Kemp for the romantic comedy
My Last Five Girlfriends.
Non-fiction
He received international recognition after the publication in 1997 of his first non-fiction work,
How Proust Can Change Your Life. The book was based on the life and works of Marcel Proust. It is a mixture of a "self-help" envelope and analysis of one of the most revered but unread books in the Western canon,
In Search of Lost Time. It was a bestseller in the U.S. and UK.
Proust was followed by
The Consolations of Philosophy in 2000. The title of the book is a reference to Boethius's
Consolation of Philosophy, in which philosophy appears as an allegorical figure to Boethius to console him in the period leading up to his impending execution. Though sometimes described as works of popularisation,
Proust and
Consolations were attempts to develop original ideas about friendship, art, envy, desire, and inadequacy, among other things, with the help of thoughts of other thinkers. In
The Consolations of Philosophy, de Botton attempts to demonstrate how the teachings of philosophers such as Epicurus, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Seneca, and Socrates can be applied to modern everyday woes such as unpopularity, feelings of inadequacy, financial worries, broken hearts, and the general problem of suffering. The book has been both praised and criticized for its therapeutic approach to philosophy.
De Botton then returned to a more lyrical, personal style of writing. In
The Art of Travel, he looked at themes in the psychology of travel: how we imagine places before we see them, how we remember beautiful things, what happens to us when we look at deserts, stay in hotels, and go to the countryside.
In
Status Anxiety (2004), de Botton examines an almost universal anxiety that is rarely mentioned directly: what others think of us; about whether we're judged a success or a failure, a winner or a loser.
In de Botton's second-most-recent book,
The Architecture of Happiness (2006) he discusses the nature of beauty in architecture and how it is related to the well-being and general contentment of the individual and society. He describes how architecture affects people every day, though people rarely pay particular attention to it. A good portion of the book discusses how human personality traits are reflected in architecture. He ends up defending Modernist architecture, and chastising the pseudo-vernacular architecture of housing, especially in UK. The best modern architecture, he argues, doesn't hold a mirror up to nature, though it may borrow a pleasing shape or expressive line from nature's copybook. It gives voice to aspirations and suggests possibilities. The question isn't whether you'd actually like to live in a Le Corbusier home, but whether you'd like to be the kind of person who'd like to live in one.
In April 2009, de Botton published his latest book,
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, a survey of ten different jobs, including accountancy, rocket science and biscuit manufacture, which includes two hundred original images and aims to unlock the beauty, interest and occasional horror of the modern world of work.
In response to a question about whether he felt "pulled" to be a writer de Botton responded:
"So, I think where people tend to end up results from a combination of encouragement, accident, and lucky break, etc. etc. Like many others, my career happened like it did because certain doors opened and certain doors closed. You know, at a certain point I thought it would be great to make film documentaries. Well, in fact, I found that to be incredibly hard and very expensive to do and I didn’t really have the courage to keep battling away at that. In another age, I might have been an academic in a university, if the university system had been different. So, it’s all about trying to find the best fit between your talents and what the world can offer at that point in time."
In August 2009, de Botton replied to a competition advertised among British literary agents by BAA, the airport management company, for the post of 'writer-in-residence' at Heathrow Airport. The post involved being seated at a desk in Terminal 5, and writing about the comings and goings of passengers over a week. De Botton was duly appointed to the position. The result was the book,
A Week at the Airport, published by Profile Books in September 2009. The book features photographs by the documentary photographer Richard Baker, with whom de Botton also worked on
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.
Newspapers, lecturing and television
De Botton writes regular articles for several English newspapers, and from 1998 to 2000, wrote a regular column for
The Independent on Sunday. He also travels extensively to lecture on his works. He owns and helps run his own production company, Seneca Productions, making television documentaries based on his works.
