In July 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to Thomas Carlyle: “My whole philosophy…teaches acquiescence and optimism.” The journals in this volume, beginning in the summer of 1841, record the spiritual history of two years that can be viewed as the most critical test in Emerson’s life of his ability to..
This new volume is the most comprehensive collection of Emerson’s writings available in a paperback edition. The selections include Emerson’s major sermons, lectures, essays, addresses, and poems, as well as excerpts from his journals, notebooks, and correspondence."Contexts" addresses the topics of..
Our most eloquent champion of individualism, Emerson acknowledges at the same time the countervailing pressures of society in American life. Even as he extols what he called “the great and crescive self,” he dramatizes and records its vicissitudes.Here are all the indispensable and most renowned wor..
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alfred Kazin observes in his Introduction, “was a great writer who turned the essay into a form all his own.” His celebrated essays the twelve published in Essays: First Series (1841) and eight in Essays: Second Series (1844) are here presented for the first time in an authorita..