Product Description

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

• Amazon Sales Rank: #303330 in Books
• Published on: 1996-11-06
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .2 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 684 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The maverick intellectual life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) is the focus of this imposing, highly erudite biography. In 1832, Emerson resigned his Boston ministry to pursue a career as an essayist, orator and poet, delivering more than 1500 lectures in his lifetime, including "The American Scholar" (1837), and publishing essays such as Nature (1836) and Representative Men (1850). As America's foremost prophet of individual experience, he was also a founder of the Transcendentalist Club, editor of the transcendentalist magazine, The Dial, and spokesman for many reformist causes. Drawing on unpublished personal journals, correspondence and lectures, Richardson (Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind) charts, in exacting detail, the minutia of Emerson's daily life in Concord, Mass., and extensive travels; the literature and philosophy he read over several decades and how his reading shaped his steadily evolving intellect. Although the nuances of Emerson's personality are eclipsed by textual analysis, Richardson balances the often chilling puritanism of Emerson's writing with a portrait of the man as hungry for friendship, maintaining close relationships with Carlisle, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott and Margaret Fuller; and whose icy doctrine of individualism reflects the loneliness caused by the premature deaths of his beloved first wife, his two younger brothers and numerous friends.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Using freshly available materials on Emerson, Richardson (Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, LJ 8/86) here fashions a lively intellectual biography of the "sage of Concord." In exacting detail, the author traces the development of Emerson's great imagination from his early student days at Harvard to his later associations with Coleridge and Carlyle. Through a study of Emerson's wide-ranging reading, Richardson reveals the origins of key Emersonian doctrines such as self-reliance, the transcendence of the soul, and the mind as an ever-erupting volcano. The great value of the biography lies in its exploration of the influences of Coleridge, Goethe, Madame de Stael, and Hindu thought on Emerson. While the intimate detail in which Emerson's life is examined is reminiscent of the pedantry of much late 19th-century American biography, Richardson offers a captivating account of the originality, creativity, and genius of the American Coleridge. This biography goes beyond John Mc-Aleer's Emerson: Days of Encounter (LJ 8/84). Recommended for large public libraries and academic collections.
Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Westerville P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Unlike Thoreau, Emerson never built a cabin on the shores of Walden Pond. But Richardson (author of a prizewinning biography of Thoreau) shows how Emerson's volcanic genius ignited flames of kindred enthusiasm in Thoreau, Whitman, Fuller, and other gifted Americans. Careful analysis of his vast reading reveals how Emerson drew inspiration from the world's classic literature yet maintained a fierce self-reliance that still defines one of the primary themes of our national culture. As in his biography of Thoreau, Richardson focuses principally on his subject's inner life, the life of his mind and spirit. But in this subtle portrayal of Emerson the thinker, the reader also sees the clearly limned portrait of Emerson the social activist, outraged by slavery and by oppressive Indian policies. Nor is the focus so narrowly cerebral that the reader does not feel the personal tragedy in the deaths of Emerson's first wife and son. Indeed, by referring to many previously unavailable private letters and manuscripts, Richardson sheds light on both Emerson's emotions and his intellect. A masterful work, this biography will attract the attention of scholars and serious general readers for decades. Bryce Christensen