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Overview
Recipient of the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians
Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most important figures in the history of American thought, religion, and literature. The vitality of his writings and the unsettling power of his example continue to influence us more than a hundred years after his death. Now Robert D. Richardson Jr. brings to life an Emerson very different from the old stereotype of the passionless Sage of Concord. Drawing on a vast amount of new material, including correspondence among the Emerson brothers, Richardson gives us a rewarding intellectual biography that is also a portrait of the whole man.
These pages present a young suitor, a grief-stricken widower, an affectionate father, and a man with an abiding genius for friendship. The great spokesman for individualism and self-reliance turns out to have been a good neighbor, an activist citizen, a loyal brother. Here is an Emerson who knew how to laugh, who was self-doubting as well as self-reliant, and who became the greatest intellectual adventurer of his age.
Richardson has, as much as possible, let Emerson speak for himself through his published works, his many journals and notebooks, his letters, his reported conversations. This is not merely a study of Emerson's writing and his influence on others; it is Emerson's life as he experienced it. We see the failed minister, the struggling writer, the political reformer, the poetic liberator.
The Emerson of this book not only influenced Thoreau, Fuller, Whitman, Dickinson, and Frost, he also inspired Nietzsche, William James, Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Jorge Luis Borges. Emerson's timeliness is persistent and striking: his insistence that literature and science are not separate cultures, his emphasis on the worth of every individual, his respect for nature.
Richardson gives careful attention to the enormous range of Emerson's readings—from Persian poets to George Sand—and to his many friendships and personal encounters—from Mary Moody Emerson to the Cherokee chiefs in Boston—evoking both the man and the times in which he lived. Throughout this book, Emerson's unquenchable vitality reaches across the decades, and his hold on us endures.
Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most important figures in the history of American thought, religion, and literature. The vitality of his writings and the unsettling power of his example continue to influence us more than a hundred years after his death. Now Robert D. Richardson Jr. brings to life an Emerson very different from the old stereotype of the passionless Sage of Concord. Drawing on a vast amount of new material, including correspondence among the Emerson brothers, Richardson gives us a rewarding intellectual biography that is also a portrait of the whole man.
These pages present a young suitor, a grief-stricken widower, an affectionate father, and a man with an abiding genius for friendship. The great spokesman for individualism and self-reliance turns out to have been a good neighbor, an activist citizen, a loyal brother. Here is an Emerson who knew how to laugh, who was self-doubting as well as self-reliant, and who became the greatest intellectual adventurer of his age.
Richardson has, as much as possible, let Emerson speak for himself through his published works, his many journals and notebooks, his letters, his reported conversations. This is not merely a study of Emerson's writing and his influence on others; it is Emerson's life as he experienced it. We see the failed minister, the struggling writer, the political reformer, the poetic liberator.
The Emerson of this book not only influenced Thoreau, Fuller, Whitman, Dickinson, and Frost, he also inspired Nietzsche, William James, Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Jorge Luis Borges. Emerson's timeliness is persistent and striking: his insistence that literature and science are not separate cultures, his emphasis on the worth of every individual, his respect for nature.
Richardson gives careful attention to the enormous range of Emerson's readings—from Persian poets to George Sand—and to his many friendships and personal encounters—from Mary Moody Emerson to the Cherokee chiefs in Boston—evoking both the man and the times in which he lived. Throughout this book, Emerson's unquenchable vitality reaches across the decades, and his hold on us endures.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520918375 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 04/22/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 684 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
About the Author
Robert D. Richardson Jr. (1934-2020) was also the author of Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (California, 1986), which won the Melcher Prize in 1987. Barry Moser is one of the foremost wood engravers and book illustrators in America.
Table of Contents
PrefaceThe Student
1. Prologue. 2. Emerson at Harvard. 3. The
March of Mind. 4. Home and Family.
5. The Angel of Death. 6. Scottish Common
Sense. 7 The Brothers Emerson. 8. The Young
Writer. 9. The Paradise of Dictionaries and
Critics. 10. Mme. de Stael and the Other
Germany. Divinity Studies.
Divinity
11. Pray without Ceasing. 12. The Prince of
Lipona. 13. The Balance Beam. 14. Ellen
Tucker. 15. Ordination and Marriage: Love
and Reason. 16. We Are What We Know.
17. Gerando and the First Philosophy. 18. The
Wreck of Earthly Good. 19. In My Study My
Faith Is Perfect. 20. Separation.
21. A Terrible Freedom.
The Inner Light
22. The American Eye. 23. I Will Be a
Naturalist. 24. A White Day in My Years.
25. The Instructed Eye. 26. Mary Rotch: Life
without Choice. 27. A Living Leaping
Logos. 28. A Theory of Animated Nature.
29. Each and All. 30. Confluence.
Nature
31. Lidian. 32. The New Jerusalem. 33. The
Art of Writing. Jakob Boehme. 34. Marriage
and Concord. 35. Alcott and English
Literature. 36. All in Each: Writing
Nature. 37. Nature: The Laws of the
World. 38. Nature: The Apocalypse of the
Mind. 39. Margaret Fuller.
Go Alone
40. The Symposium. 41. The Forging of the
Anchor. 42. We Are Not Children of Time.
43. The American Scholar. 44. Casting
Off. 45. Human Culture. 46. The Peace
Principle and the Cherokee Trail of Tears.
47. Henry Thoreau. 48. Go Alone: Refuse the
Great Models.
These Flying Days
49. New Books, New Problems. 50. Jones
Very. 51. The Attainable Self. 52. Home and
Family. 53. Writing Essays. 54. The Heart
Has Its Jubilees. 55. Identity and
Metamorphosis. 56. Brook Farm and Margaret
Fuller. 57. Pythagoras and Plotinus.
58. Osman s Ring: A Work of Ecstasy. 59. The
Frightful Hollows of Space.
Children of the Fire
60. The Dream of Community. 61. Children of
the Fire. 62. Emerson's Dial. 63. New
Views. 64. The World. 65. The Young
American. 66. Emerson s Emancipation
Address. 67. Essays on Power. 68. Ex Oriente
Lux.
The Natural History of Intellect
69. Representative Men. 70. The
Lecturer. 71. Persia and Poetry. 72. The New
Domestic Order. Poems. 73. The Orchard
Keeper. 74. I Shall Never Graduate.
75. England. 76. The Natural History of
Intellect. 77. Chartism and Revolution.
The Science of Liberty
78. Return: Quarrel with Thoreau.
79. The Walden Sierras. Quetelet.
80. Therienism and the Hegelian Moment.
81. The West. 82. The Matter of
Margaret. 83. The Tragic. 84. The Conduct
of Life. 85. The Fugitive Slave Act. 86. The
Science of Liberty.
Fame
87. My Platoon. 88. Country Walking and the
Sea. 89. English Traits. 90. Fame.
91. Whitman. 92. The Remedy at the Hour of
Need. 93. The Power and Terror of Thought.
Endings
94. Memory. 95. Civil War. Death of
Thoreau. 96. Terminus. 97. May-Day.
98. Harvard. California. Fire. 99. Philae and
Parnassus. 100. Fire at the Core of the World.
Genealogies
Chronology of the Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Principal Sources
Notes
Index
Illustrations
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