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A seminal figure in American literature and philosophy, Ralph Waldo Emerson is considered the apostle of self-reliance, fully alive within his ideas and disarmingly confident about his innermost thoughts. Yet the circumstances around "The American Scholar" oration--his first great public address and the most celebrated talk in American academic history--suggest a different Emerson. In Understanding Emerson, Kenneth Sacks draws on a wealth of contemporary correspondence and diaries, much of it previously unexamined, to reveal a young intellectual struggling to define himself and his principles. Caught up in the fierce dispute between his Transcendentalist colleagues and Harvard, the secular bastion of Boston Unitarianism and the very institution he was invited to honor with the annual Phi Beta Kappa address, Emerson agonized over compromising his sense of self-reliance while simultaneously desiring to meet the expectations of his friends. Putting aside self-doubts and a resistance to controversy, in the end he produced an oration of extraordinary power and authentic vision that propelled him to greater awareness of social justice, set the standard for the role of the intellectual in America, and continues to point the way toward educational reform. In placing this singular event within its social and philosophical context, Sacks opens a window into America's nineteenth-century intellectual landscape as well as documenting the evolution of Emerson's idealism. Engagingly written, this book, which includes the complete text of "The American Scholar," allows us to appreciate fully Emerson's brilliant rebuke of the academy and his insistence that the most important truths derive not from books and observation but from intuition within each of us. Rising defiantly before friend and foe, Emerson triumphed over his hesitations, redirecting American thought and pedagogy and creating a personal tale of quiet heroism.
"Every great man is a unique". R.W Emerson told us that Self-confidence is always about independence : "What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."
Illustrated by classic American paintings and photographs, and accompanied with a prescient new appraisal, this stunning publication on Emerson’s seminal 1836 essay is at once a meditation on the ways artists influence each other and a timely cri de coeur to cherish and preserve America’s landscape. Widely considered to be the foundational text of the American landscape tradition, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature urges Americans to value and immerse themselves in their country’s landscape, to build American culture from America's nature. Nearly two centuries after the original publication of the essay Nature by Emerson, this captivating book by critic and historian Tyler Green brings together a selection of artistic works in dialog with Emerson’s text for the first time. Green also offers his own fascinating take on Nature through new research into how the essay was informed by Emerson’s experiences of art and, in turn, how it informed American art well into the twentieth century. The result is a unique melding of essay, art, and ideas that will draw new readers to Emerson’s writings, while also introducing a fresh perspective on a critical contribution to the American canon and showing what impact Emerson's text still has for the US to this day.
Drawing primarily from previously unpublished manuscripts in the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association Collection in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, recent editions of Emerson's correspondence, journals and notebooks, sermons, and early lectures have provided authoritative texts that inspire readers to consider Emerson's place in American culture afresh. The two-volume Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843–1871, presents the texts of forty-eight complete and unpublished lectures delivered during the crucial middle years of Emerson's career. They offer his thoughts on New England and “Old World” history and culture, poetic theory, education, the history and uses of intellect—as well as his ideas on race relations and women's rights, subjects that sparked many debates. These final volumes contain some of Emerson's most timelessly relevant work and are sure to engage and inform any reader interested in discovering one of our country's greatest intellectuals. The following sections, although appearing only in the volume designated, contain information that pertains to both volumes and are available on the University of Georgia Press website. Volume 1: 1843–1854 contains: Preface Works Frequently Cited Historical and Textual Introduction Volume 2: 1855–1871 contains: Manuscript Sources of Emerson's Later Lectures in the Houghton Library of Harvard University Index to Works by Emerson General Index
How do I live a good life, one that is deeply personal and sensitive to others? John T. Lysaker suggests that those who take this question seriously need to reexamine the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In philosophical reflections on topics such as genius, divinity, friendship, and reform, Lysaker explores "self-culture" or the attempt to remain true to one's deepest commitments. He argues that being true to ourselves requires recognition of our thoroughly dependent and relational nature. Lysaker guides readers from simple self-absorption toward a more fulfilling and responsive engagement with the world.
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.
Harry Emerson Fosdick was one of the most popular liberal preachers of the early twentieth century, and his The Meaning of Faith is considered by many one of the finest reconciliations of religious belief with modern scientific thought. This charming little book features daily devotional readings focused on understanding faith, reflecting upon: .Faith and Life's Adventure .Faith A Road to Truth .Faith's Intellectual Difficulties .Faith's Greatest Obstacle .Faith and Science .Faith and Moods and other hurdles in honoring one's belief. This thoughtful, friendly interpretation of the holy book of one of the world's dominant faiths is a powerful corrective to reflexively fundamental thinking... just as it was when it was first published in 1917. Also available from Cosimo Classics: Fosdick's The Manhood of the Master and The Meaning of Prayer. American theologian HARRY EMERSON FOSDICK (1878-1969) was born in New York, educated at Colgate and Columbia Universities, and served as professor of practical theology at Union Theological Seminary from 1915 to 1946. Among his many works are A Guide to Understanding the Bible (1938) and A Book of Public Prayers (1960).
A comprehensive collection of Emerson's writings against slavery and the subjugation of American Indians - writings that reveal Emerson's deep commitment to social reform. Included are 18 works by Emerson, including speeches and lectures, on the subject of slavery, written between 1838 and 1863.