Almost all of the eight masters are also accomplished in other aspects of Chinese politics and culture of their time.
Zhu You [zh], a scholar during the early Ming, first collected the essays of the eight, but it was the late Ming scholar Mao Kun [zh] who coined the name in a book called "Compiled Transcriptions of the Eight Great Prose Masters of the Tang and Song"; the subsequent popularity of this book cemented the place of the eight as masters of Chinese prose writing.
During the Qing dynasty, Wei Yuan had eight volumes on the Eight Prose Masters (《纂评唐宋八大家文读本》).
In terms of prose, Han Yu and Liu Zongyuan were stylistic innovators.
Responding against the florid and tightly restricted pianwen prose form, which had become de rigueur since the Han dynasty, they promoted and wrote essays in a more direct, colloquial style which harkened back to more ancient Chinese prose; as a result, this literary movement was known as the Classical Prose Movement.