Synopses & Reviews
A comprehensive collection of writings by the most influential writer of the nineteenth century” (Harold Bloom) Ralph Waldo Emersons diverse body of work has done more than perhaps any other thinker to shape and define the American mind. Literary giants including Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman were among Emersons admirers and protégés, while his central text, Nature, singlehandedly engendered an entire spiritual and intellectual movement in transcendentalism. This long-awaited updatethe first in more than thirty yearspresents the core of Emersons writings, including Nature and The American Scholar, along with revelatory journal entries, letters, poetry, and a sermon.
Synopsis
Edited with an Introduction by Larzer Ziff.
Synopsis
An indispensible look at Emerson's influential life philosophy
Through his writing and his own personal philosophy, Ralph Waldo Emerson unburdened his young country of Europe's traditional sense of history and showed Americans how to becreators of their own circumstances. His mandate, which called for harmony with, rather than domestication of, nature, and for areliance on individual integrity, rather than on materialistic institutions, is echoed in many of the great American philosophical and literary works of his time and ours, and has given an impetus to modern political and social activism.
Larzer Ziff's introduction to this collection of fifteen of Emerson's most significant writings provides the important backdrop to the society in which Emerson lived during his formative years.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theseries to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-datetranslations by award-winning translators."
Synopsis
Through his writing and his own personal philosophy, Ralph Waldo Emerson unburdened his young country of Europe's traditional sense of history and showed Americans how to be creators of their own circumstances. His mandate, which called for harmony with, rather than domestication of, nature, and for a reliance on individual integrity, rather than on materialistic institutions, is echoed in many of the great American philosophical and literary works of his time and ours, and has given an impetus to modern political and social activism.
Larzer Ziff's introduction to this collection of fifteen of Emerson's most significant writings provides the important backdrop to the society in which Emerson lived during his formative years.
About the Author
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the son of a Unitarian minister and a chaplain during the American Revolution, was born in 1803 in Boston. He attended the Boston Latin School, and in 1817 entered Harvard, graduating in 1820. Emerson supported himself as a schoolteacher from 1821-26. In 1826 he was "approbated to preach," and in 1829 became pastor of the Scond Church (Unitarian) in Boston. That same year he married Ellen Louise Tucker, who was to die of tuberculosis only seventeen months later. In 1832 Emerson resigned his pastorate and traveled to Eurpe, where he met Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle. He settled in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1834, where he began a new career as a public lecturer, and married Lydia Jackson a year later. A group that gathered around Emerson in Concord came to be known as "the Concord school," and included Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller. Every year Emerson made a lecture tour; and these lectures were the source of most of his essays.
Nature (1836), his first published work, contained the essence of his transcendental philosophy , which views the world of phenomena as a sort of symbol of the inner life and emphasizes individual freedom and self-reliance. Emerson's address to the Phi Beta Kappa society of Harvard (1837) and another address to the graduating class of the Harvard Divinity School (1838) applied his doctrine to the scholar and the clergyman, provoking sharp controversy. An ardent abolitionist, Emerson lectured and wrote widely against slavery from the 1840's through the Civil War. His principal publications include two volumes of
Essays (1841, 1844),
Poems (1847),
Representative Men (1850),
The Conduct of Life (1860), and
Society and Solitude (1870). He died of pneumonia in 1882 and was buried in Concord.
Larzer Ziff is a research professor of English at Johns Hopkins University who has written extensively on American literary culture.
Table of Contents
Introduction 7
Suggestions for Further Reading 29
A Note on the Text 31
Essays
- Nature 1836 35
- The American Scholar 1837 83
- An Address Delivered Before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge 1838 107
- Man the Reformer 1841 129
- History (Essays, First Series) 1841 149
- Self-Reliance (Essays, First Series) 1841 175
- The Over-Soul (Essays, First Series) 1841 205
- Circles (Essays, First Series) 1841 225
- The Transcendentalist 1842 239
- The Poet (Essays, Second Series) 1844 259
- Experience (Essays, Second Series) 1844 285
- Montaigne; Or, the Skeptic (Representative Men) 1850 313
- Napoleon; Or, the Man of the World (Representative Men) 1850 337
- Fate (The Conduct of Life) 1860 361
- Thoreau 1862 393