Books by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Modern Library Classics)
Introduction by Mary Oliver
Commentary by Henry James, Robert Frost, Matthew Arnold, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry David Thoreau
The definitive collection of Emerson’s major speeches, essays, and poetry, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson chronicles the life’s work of a true “American Scholar.” As one of the architects of the transcendentalist movement, Emerson embraced a philosophy that championed the individual, emphasized independent thought, and prized “the splendid labyrinth of one’s own perceptions.” More than any writer of his time, he forged a style distinct from his European predecessors and embodied and defined what it meant to be an American. Matthew Arnold called Emerson’s essays “the most important work done in prose.”
INCLUDES A MODERN LIBRARY READING GROUP GUIDE
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Natural Abundance: Ralph Waldo Emerson's Guide to Prosperity (Library of Hidden Knowledge)
Dr. Ruth L. Miller interprets a few essential essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson that tell us how the world always responds to our thoughts, words, and actions, and what we can do to ensure that our life is truly joy-filled in all aspects. In clear, simple language, she gives us a direct sense of what Emerson felt, saw, and struggled to share with his fellow human beings.
Emerson transcended the limitations of his day. Using common sense, a love of nature, and his own particular genius, he expressed a higher truth about who we are and how the world gives us exactly what we demand from it.
Yet, perhaps because he was so popular, and because so much of what was popularized focused on the need to transcend materialism and reconnect with Nature, some of his core ideas were lost to later generations. They were there, buried in the long sentences and extended paragraphs of his often-overlooked essays—but were discovered only by the few who were willing to take the time and seek them out. These few became great teachers in their own right, the founders and leaders of institutions and movements that have changed history.
Natural Abundance makes the hidden treasures of Emerson’s wisdom accessible to 21st century readers. Through it, this great man’s alignment of his heart’s knowing and his intellect’s understanding can lead all of us to a more abundantly fulfilling life, today.
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Nature (Penguin Great Ideas)
Through his writing and his own personal philosophy, the famed philosopher 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.
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Nature and Selected Essays (Penguin Classics)
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 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.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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The Portable Emerson
A comprehensive collection of writings by “the most influential writer of the nineteenth century” (Harold Bloom)
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 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 Emerson’s admirers and protégés, while his central text, Nature, singlehandedly engendered an entire spiritual and intellectual movement in transcendentalism. This long-awaited update—the first in more than thirty years—presents the core of Emerson’s writings, including Nature and The American Scholar, along with revelatory journal entries, letters, poetry, and a sermon.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Signet Classics)
An unparalled collection delves into the timeless works of one of the greatest figures in American literature, featuring his critical essays, poems, and letters, as well as material from his journals including an entry discovered in 1964 in the Library of Congress. Original.
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Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Signet Classics)
A classic collection of critical essays, poems, and letters from one of the greatest minds of nineteenth-century America.
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Self-Reliance and Other Essays (Dover Thrift Editions: Philosophy)
Essayist, poet, and philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) propounded a transcendental idealism emphasizing self-reliance, self-culture, and individual expression. The six essays and one address included in this volume, selected from Essays, First Series (1841) and Essays, Second Series (1844), offer a representative sampling of his views outlining that moral idealism as well as a hint of the later skepticism that colored his thought. In addition to the celebrated title essay, the others included here are "History," "Friendship," "The Over-Soul," "The Poet," and "Experience," plus the well-known and frequently read Harvard Divinity School Address.
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Self-Reliance
A beautifully designed new edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s most famous essay, “Self-Reliance,” bringing his timeless classic to a contemporary audience.
It is the once-in-a-generation events that reshape our world and our thinking, and it is in such times that we turn to timeless works that offer reassurance and provide inspiration. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in “Self-Reliance,” which resonates just as strongly now, “The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing.” When Emerson published his most famous essay in 1841, it was in the aftermath of the calamitous financial collapse of 1837. His positive vision for the power of individualism and personal responsibility was issued in a climate filled with panic and uncertainty, and at a time, much like today, when the values of society and humanity were in the process of being reformed.
Emerson’s text is widely available to read online, but this new, graphically reimagined edition, produced with Design Observer, elevates his wisdom through the printed word and includes twelve contemporary essays by Jessica Helfand. To suggest, as Emerson’s text does, that the richest lives are lived with an independent mind, spirit, and creativity surely deserves to be celebrated. Illustrated throughout
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The Tao of Emerson: The Wisdom of the Tao Te Ching as Found in the Words of Ralph Waldo Emerson
by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lao Tse
The Tao of Emerson strikingly brings together two of the most influential voices in the history of letters: Lao Tse, the sixth-century B.C. Chinese mystic, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American transcendentalist known to many as “the sage of Concord.”
By adroitly juxtaposing on facing pages the texts of Lao Tse’s masterpiece, the Tao Te Ching, with Emerson’s writings, Richard Grossman illuminates how these two remarkable men, from opposite sides of the world and separated by 2,500 years, are united in an inspired wisdom and common spirit: to live simply and tranquilly; trust one’s own intuition; seek out and appreciate the spiritual grace in the natural world; act without self-assertion; abjure violence; harmonize with the ebb and flow of nature and circumstances; and, above all, assure that there is a place in the world for humility, yielding, gentleness, and serenity.
There is no direct path linking Lao Tse to Emerson, since the Tao Te Ching was not translated into English until 1891, nine years after Emerson’s death. But America’s Founding Thinker was nonetheless in many ways the heir to the great Chinese mystic’s insight and philosophy. As Grossman observes, “Emerson’s brand of fresh home-grown English adds a radiant color to the ancient thoughts of the Chinese Master.”
Although Lao Tse was a citizen of the world’s oldest empire and Emerson of its youngest republic, The Tao of Emerson makes the brilliantly presented case that a common literary thread binds these two men. Grossman’s Introduction, in which he compares the men’s lives, and the passages he has selected from their work give both writers a special resonance for today’s reader and help to reveal Emerson in a while new light.
This volume includes original brush calligraphy by the celebrated Taoist master Chungliang Al Huang.
Praise for The Tao of Emerson
“This inspired book from one of Emerson’s strongest readers is a great gift. Through the reflected light of the Tao Te Ching, Richard Grossman has made the core of Emerson’s wisdom transparent, allowing us to see into the heart of what makes the sage of Concord our very own Lao Tse.” —Richard G. Geldard, editor of The Essential Transcendentalists
“One measure of a spiritually serious book is whether it repeatedly stops us dead in our tracks as we read it and allows us to foresee the ultimate triumph of truth and principle in our lives and in the life of the world. This is such a book.” —Jacob Needleman, author of Why Can’t We Be Good?
“Deeply immersing himself in both the wisdom of Lao Tse and the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Grossman has produced a remarkable Guide to life, a handbook filled with venerable worlds combined to yield a new poetry of the mind. Reading it, ‘we stand,’ with Emerson, ‘before the secrets of the world.’” —Megan Marshall, author of The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism
“This marvelous volume will bring joy and light to those who know or even suspect that Emersonianism is not a system, a product, or a position but a way or a path. For those who haven’t yet gotten it but want to try, this book is the perfect place to start.” —Robert D. Richardson, Jr., author of Emerson: The Mind on Fire
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Poetry, like its companion prose volume, presents a selection of definitively edited texts drawn chiefly from the multivolume Collected Works. Accompanying each poem is a headnote prepared by Albert von Frank for the student and general reader, which serves as an entryway to the poem, offering critical and historical contexts. Detailed annotations provide further guidance.
A master of the essay form, a philosopher of moods and self-reliance, and the central figure in the American romantic movement, Emerson makes many claims on our attention. Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Poetry reminds us exactly why his poetry also matters and why he remains one of our most important theoreticians of verse. Emerson saw his poetry and philosophy as coordinate ways of seeing the world. “It is not metres,” he once declared, “but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,―a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.”
All the major poems published in Emerson’s lifetime―chosen from Poems (1847), May-Day and Other Pieces (1867), and Selected Poems (1876) as well as uncollected poems―are represented here. Also included in an appendix is the first selection ever made of the poems and poetic fragments that Emerson addressed to his first wife, Ellen, during their courtship and marriage and concluding with the anguish of bereavement following her death on February 8, 1831, at the age of nineteen.
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The Annotated Emerson
A brilliant essayist and a master of the aphorism (“Our moods do not believe in each other”; “Money often costs too much”), Emerson has inspired countless writers. He challenged Americans to shut their ears against Europe’s “courtly muses” and to forge a new, distinctly American cultural identity. But he remains one of America’s least understood writers. And, by his own admission, he spawned neither school nor follower (he valued independent thought too much). Now, in this annotated selection of Emerson’s writings, David Mikics instructs the reader in a larger appreciation of Emerson’s essential works and the remarkable thinker who produced them.
Full of color illustrations and rich in archival photographs, this volume offers much for the specialist and general reader. In his running commentaries on Emerson’s essays, addresses, and poems, Mikics illuminates contexts, allusions, and language likely to cause difficulty to modern readers. He quotes extensively from Emerson’s Journal to shed light on particular passages or lines and examines Emerson the essayist, poet, itinerant lecturer, and political activist. Finally, in his Foreword, Phillip Lopate makes the case for Emerson as a spectacular truth teller―a model of intellectual labor and anti-dogmatic sanity.
Anyone who values Emerson will want to own this edition. Those wishing to discover, or to reacquaint themselves with, Emerson’s writings but who have not known where or how to begin will not find a better starting place or more reliable guide than The Annotated Emerson.
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Nature Walking (The Concord Library)
by Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson
Together in one volume, Emerson's Nature and Thoreau's Walking, is writing that defines our distinctly American relationship to nature.
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The Political Emerson: Essential Writings on Politics and Social Reform
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) never considered himself a political thinker. And yet he rose to prominence during one of the most turbulent times in U.S. history. As a result, political questions grew in importance for him, becoming by the 1860s one of his chief concerns as a public intellectual. In The Political Emerson, David M. Robinson has brought together for the first time the best of Emerson's numerous writings on politics and social reform.
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The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Writings by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) is known best in the twenty-first century as a literary innovator and early architect of American intellectual culture, but his writings still offer spiritual sustenance to the thoughtful reader. The Spiritual Emerson, originally published on the two hundredth anniversary of the writer's birth, brings together the writings that articulate Emerson's spiritual vision and promise the greatest relevance to today's reader.
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Representative Men: Seven Lectures (Modern Library Classics)
Introduction by Brenda Wineapple
In 1845 Ralph Waldo Emerson began a series of lectures and writings in which he limned six figures who embodied the principles and aspirations of a still-young American republic. Emerson offers timeless meditations on the value of individual greatness, reconnecting readers with the everyday virtues of his “Representative Men”: Plato, in whose writings are contained “the culture of nations”; Emanuel Swedenborg, a “rich discoverer” who strove to unite the scientific and spiritual planes; Michel de Montaigne, “the frankest and honestest of all writers”; William Shakespeare, who “wrote the text of modern life”; Napoleon Bonaparte, who had the “virtues and vices” of common men writ large; and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who “in conversation, in calamity…finds new materials.”
This Modern Library Paperback Classic reflects the author’s corrections for an 1876 reprinting.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson : Collected Poems and Translations (Library of America)
Emerson’s incomparable brilliance as a prose writer has often overshadowed his remarkable gifts as a poet. Gathering both published and unpublished work, this Library of America edition makes available for the first time to general readers the full range of Emerson’s poetry, including many poems left in manuscript at his death that have hitherto been available only in drastically edited versions or specialized scholarly texts. Displacing all previous editions in its comprehensiveness and textual authority, this volume reveals the ecstatic, mystical, and private meditative sides of one of the greatest of all American writers.
All the poetry Emerson published during his lifetime is included in this single volume. His collections, Poems (1847), May-Day and Other Pieces (1867), and Selected Poems (1876), as well as other pieces written for magazines, fuse close observations of the New England landscape with far-reaching spiritual explorations. His familiarity with botany and geology, Greek philosophy, Persian poetry, and anti-slavery politics gives his writing an intellectual breadth, and a challenging, continuing modernity unique among American poets of his time.
More than half the volume is devoted to a generous selection of poetry from Emerson’s journals and notebooks, ranging from his childhood to his final years as a writer. This work—printed here as Emerson wrote it, without the revisions imposed by earlier editors—is a revelation: a bounty of formal experimentation and speculative thought that displays, as in a painter’s sketchbook, the creative process at work.
Also included are Emerson’s little-known poetic translations, chiefly from the Persian poets Hafiz and Saadi, whose fusion of sensuality and mysticism so profoundly influenced his poetic thinking. With them is the complete La Vita Nuova (The New Life), Dante’s meditation on love that Emerson translated into English for the first time.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
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Emerson: Essays and Lectures: Nature: Addresses and Lectures / Essays: First and Second Series / Representative Men / English Traits / The Conduct of Life (Library of America)
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 works, including “The American Scholar” (“our intellectual Declaration of Independence,” as Oliver Wendell Holmes called it), “The Divinity School Address,” considered atheistic by many of his listeners, the summons to “Self-Reliance,” along with the more embattled realizations of “Circles” and, especially, “Experience.” Here, too, are his wide-ranging portraits of Montaigne, Shakespeare, and other “representative men,” and his astute observations on the habits, lives, and prospects of the English and American people.
This volume includes Emerson’s well-known Nature; Addresses, and Lectures (1849), his Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844), plus Representative Men (1850), English Traits (1856), and his later book of essays, The Conduct of Life (1860). These are the works that established Emerson’s colossal reputation in America and found him admirers abroad as diverse as Carlyle, Nietzsche, and Proust. The reasons for Emerson’s influence and durability will be obvious to any reader who follows the exhilarating, exploratory movements of his mind in this uniquely full gathering of his work.
Not merely another selection of his essays, this volume includes all his major books in their rich entirety. No other volume conveys so comprehensively the exhilaration and exploratory energy of perhaps America’s greatest writer.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
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Emerson: Poems: Edited by Peter Washington (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series)
Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the best-loved figures in nineteenth-century American literature. Though he earned his central place in our culture as an essayist and philosopher, since his death his reputation as a poet has grown as well.
Known for challenging traditional thought and for his faith in the individual, Emerson was the chief spokesman for the Transcendentalist movement. His poems speak to his most passionately held belief: that external authority should be disregarded in favor of one’s own experience. From the embattled farmers who “fired the shot heard round the world” in the stirring “Concord Hymn,” to the flower in “The Rhodora,” whose existence demonstrates “that if eyes were made for seeing, / Then Beauty is its own excuse for being,” Emerson celebrates the existence of the sublime in the human and in nature.
Combining intensity of feeling with his famous idealism, Emerson’s poems reveal a moving, more intimate side of the man revered as the Sage of Concord.
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Nature and Other Essays
A collection of essays from the father of the American transcendentalism, including “Nature,” “Self-Reliance,” “Love,” and “Art.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous essay “Nature” declared that understanding nature was the key to understanding God and reality, and laid the groundwork for transcendentalism. His legacy of boldly questioning the doctrine of his day and connecting with nature will resonate with today’s readers in search of meaning and enlightenment.
Essays include “Nature” (1836) and Emerson’s first series, published in 1841: “History,” “Self-Reliance,” “Compensation,” “Spiritual Laws,” “Love,” “Friendship,” “Prudence,” “Heroism,” “The Over-Soul,” “Circles,” “Intellect,” and “Art.”
Nature and Other Essays joins Gibbs Smith’s best-selling Wilderness series. Standing beside the works of his protégée Henry David Thoreau, as well as John Muir, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Jack London, these essays are reissued to encourage and inspire philosophers, travelers, campers, and contemporary naturalists.
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A Year with Emerson
Arranged for daily inspiration, wisdom from one of America’s great visionary and philosophical minds.
“A chief event of life is that day on which we have encountered a mind that startled us.” A Year with Emerson is a feast of 365 such days. Known throughout the world for his cogent, epigrammatic writing, admired as the “George Washington of American Literature,” his work is even more enriching in bigger doses.
Daily almanac entries present the heart of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ideas and philosophy. Some were written on the very day in which they appear in the book, some are speculations and musings of the season and the natural world, but all are unfailingly wise, still relevant to our modern times.
Emerson’s mind ranged across the universe even as he traveled the length and breadth of the United States and Europe. With Emerson as a companion and guide, we meet the ideas and personalities he championed and encountered, from Lincoln to John Muir, from Carlyle to Montaigne, and, of course, the close New England circle of Hawthorne, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and the Alcotts. With company such as this, and the scope of Emerson’s vision, you're sure to encounter rich food for thought every day of the year.
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A Year with Emerson
Arranged for daily inspiration, wisdom from one of America’s great visionary and philosophical minds.
“A chief event of life is that day on which we have encountered a mind that startled us.” A Year with Emerson is a feast of 365 such days. Known throughout the world for his cogent, epigrammatic writing, admired as the “George Washington of American Literature,” his work is even more enriching in bigger doses.
Daily almanac entries present the heart of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ideas and philosophy. Some were written on the very day in which they appear in the book, some are speculations and musings of the season and the natural world, but all are unfailingly wise, still relevant to our modern times.
Emerson’s mind ranged across the universe even as he traveled the length and breadth of the United States and Europe. With Emerson as a companion and guide, we meet the ideas and personalities he championed and encountered, from Lincoln to John Muir, from Carlyle to Montaigne, and, of course, the close New England circle of Hawthorne, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and the Alcotts. With company such as this, and the scope of Emerson’s vision, you're sure to encounter rich food for thought every day of the year.
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The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Works by Ralph Waldo Emerson (Tarcher Cornerstone Editions)
This concise volume collects the core writings that have made Ralph Waldo Emerson into a key source of insight for spiritual seekers of every faith—with an introduction by the bestselling philosopher Jacob Needleman.
Here is the essential collection of Emerson’s spiritual thought for those readers who understand the transformative quality of ideas. It is concise and suited to years of rereading and contemplation, offering the essays that trace the arc of the inner message brought by America’s “Yankee Mystic.”
The Spiritual Emerson features many of Emerson’s landmark works. Yet also included are overlooked classics, such as the essays “Fate” and “Success,” which served as major sources of inspiration to some of the leading American metaphysical thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The introduction by religious scholar and philosopher Jacob Needleman frames—historically and philosophically—the development of Emerson’s thought and explores why it has such a powerful hold on us today.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Journals 1841-1877 (Library of America Ralph Waldo Emerson Edition)
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
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Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Journals Vol. 1 1820-1842 (LOA #201) (Library of America Ralph Waldo Emerson Edition)
When Emerson died in 1882 he was the most famous public intellectual in America. Yet his most remarkable literary creation--his journals--remained unpublished. Begun when he was a precocious Harvard junior of 16 and continued without significant lapse for almost 60 years, Emerson's journals were his life's work. They were the starting point for virtually everything in his celebrated essays, lectures, and poems. It would be a hundred years after his death before these intimate records would appear in print in their entirety, and they are still, at over three million words, among the least known and least available of Emerson's writings.
With Selected Journals 1820-1842 and its companion volume Selected Journals 1841-1877, The Library of America presents the most ample and comprehensive nonspecialist edition of Emerson's great work ever published--one that retains the original order in which he composed his thoughts and preserves the dramatic range of his unique style in long, uninterrupted passages, but without the daunting critical apparatus of the 16-volume scholarly edition. Each volume includes a 16-page portfolio of images of Emerson and his contemporaries, a note on the selections, extensive notes, biographical sketches, a chronology, and an index.
This volume begins with Emerson's first journal entry, on January 25, 1820, in a homemade booklet he titled The Wide World, and follows him through his early years at Harvard College and the Divinity School, his ordination as a Unitarian minister, his marriage to Ellen Tucker and her untimely death, his fateful decision to leave the ministry, and his travels in England and on the Continent. It offers an irreplaceable perspective on the intellectual currents of the day--the emergence of Transcendentalism; the furor over Emerson's "Divinity School Address"; the founding of The Dial; experiments in communal living at Fruitlands and Brook Farm--and intimate sketches of Emerson's friends and contemporaries, including Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Thomas Carlyle, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
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Solid Seasons: The Friendship of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson
by Henry David Thoreau, Jeffrey S. Cramer, Ralph Waldo Emerson
A thoughtfully researched, movingly presented dual-biography of two iconic American writers, each trying to find the ideal friend with whom they could share their journey through our imperfect world.
Any biography that concentrates on either Henry David Thoreau or Ralph Waldo Emerson tends to diminish the other figure, but in Solid Seasons both men remain central and equal. Through several decades of writing, friendship remained a primary theme for them both.
Collecting extracts from the letters and journals of both men, as well as words written about them by their contemporaries, Jeffrey S. Cramer beautifully illustrates the full nature of their twenty-five-year dialogue. Biographers like to point at the crisis in their friendship, focusing particularly on Thoreau's disappointment in Emerson―rarely on Emerson's own disappointment in Thoreau―and leaving it there, a friendship ruptured. But the solid seasons remained, as is evident when, in 1878, Anne Burrows Gilchrist, the English writer and friend of Whitman, visited Emerson. She wrote that his memory was failing "as to recent names and topics but as is usual in such cases all the mental impressions that were made when he was in full vigour remain clear and strong." As they chatted, Emerson called to his wife, Lidian, in the next room, "What was the name of my best friend?"
"Henry Thoreau," she answered.
"Oh, yes," Emerson repeated. "Henry Thoreau."
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The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume 2 (Volume 2)
Volume 2 includes a detailed chronology of the events in Emerson's life during the months between July 1829 and October 1830. Explanatory footnotes, textual endnotes, and a comprehensive index further add to this significant contribution to our understanding of one of America's foremost thinkers.
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The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Belknap Press)
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 authoritative one-volume edition, which incorporates all the changes and corrections Emerson made after their initial publication.
The text is reproduced from the second and third volumes of The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a critical edition which draws on the vast body of Emerson scholarship of the last half century. Alfred R. Ferguson was founding editor of the edition, followed by Joseph Slater (until 1996).
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The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings (Modern Library Classics)
by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller
Transcendentalism was the first major intellectual movement in U.S. history, championing the inherent divinity of each individual, as well as the value of collective social action. In the mid-nineteenth century, the movement took off, changing how Americans thought about religion, literature, the natural world, class distinctions, the role of women, and the existence of slavery.
Edited by the eminent scholar Lawrence Buell, this comprehensive anthology contains the essential writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and their fellow visionaries. There are also reflections on the movement by Charles Dickens, Henry James, Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. This remarkable volume introduces the radical innovations of a brilliant group of thinkers whose impact on religious thought, social reform, philosophy, and literature continues to reverberate in the twenty-first century.
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The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume 3 (Volume 3)
The forty-five sermons collected in Volume 3 were composed and first delivered between October 1830 and November 1831. During that time Emerson's first wife, Ellen Tucker Emerson, died of tuberculosis, a loss that deeply affected Emerson.
Transcribed and edited from manuscripts in Harvard's University's Houghton Library, the sermons are presented in a clear text approximating as nearly as possible the original version delivered to Emerson's congregation. As well as the detailed chronology, explanatory footnotes, and textual endnotes found in previous volumes, this one contains a comprehensive index.
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Emerson in His Journals
This long-awaited volume offers the general reader the heart of Emerson’s journals, that extraordinary series of diaries and notebooks in which he poured out his thoughts for more than fifty years, beginning with the “luckless ragamuffin ideas” of his college days.
Emerson as revealed in his journals is more spontaneous, more complex, more human and appealing than he appears in the published works. This man is the seeker rather than the sage; he records the turmoil, struggle, and questioning that preceded the serene and confident affirmations of the essays. He is honest, earthy, tough-minded, self-critical (“I am a lover of indolence, & of the belly”), warm in his enthusiasms, a witty and sharp observer of people and events. Everything is grist for his mill: personal experiences, his omnivorous reading, ruminations on matters large and small, his doubts and perplexities, public issues and local gossip. There are abrupt shifts in subject and tone, reflecting the variousness of his moods and the restless energy of his mind.
Drawing from Harvard’s sixteen-volume scholarly edition of the journals―but omitting the textual apparatus that makes it hard to read―Joel Porte presents a sympathetic selection that brings us close to Emerson the man.
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Emerson's Antislavery Writings
This book presents the first comprehensive and authoritative 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 speeches and lectures that have never before been published or collected in any other edition of Emerson’s writings.
"Taken together, this group of writings constitutes a critical mass of evidence that demonstrates Emerson’s continuous involvement in protest against slavery and other forms of social oppression much more dramatically than has been done before." —Lawrence Buell, Harvard University
"This valuable collection contains eighteen works by Emerson on the subject of slavery written between 1838 and 1863. . . . The texts are well annotated, and a historical introduction rightly demonstrates Emerson’s important participation in the abolition movement." —Nineteenth-Century Literature
"This new volume . . . seeks to put Emerson’s views on abolitionism in a clearer light while fitting the writings into the larger frame of his philosophy of social reform. . . . A skillfully edited volume . . . [that adds] to a deeper understanding of Emerson’s thought." —Charles Sermon, State
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Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays: First and Second Series: A Library of America Paperback Classic
A compilation of the best essays written by the father of transcendentalism, with selections from Emerson’s lectures on history, art, politics, and more
In the words of Harold Bloom, “Emerson's prose is his triumph, both as eloquence and as insight. After Shakespeare, it matches anything else in the language.” Here are Ralph Waldo Emerson's classic essays, including the exhortation to “Self-Reliance,” the embattled realizations of “Circles” and “Experience,” and the groundbreaking achievement of “Nature.” 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 calls “the great and crescive self,” he dramatizes and records its vicissitudes. Also gathered here are his wide-ranging discourses on history, art, politics, friendship, love, and much more.
For almost thirty years, The Library of America has presented America's best and most significant writing in acclaimed hardcover editions. Now, a new series, Library of America Paperback Classics, offers attractive and affordable books that bring The Library of America's authoritative texts within easy reach of every reader. Each book features an introductory essay by a leading writer, as well as a detailed chronology of the author's life and career, an essay on the choice and history of the text, and notes.
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Nature and Other Essays (Dover Thrift Editions: Philosophy)
He was an ordained minister, renowned orator, and beloved author and poet whose ideas on nature, philosophy, and religion influenced authors such as Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. Through his writings, Emerson ardently professed the importance of being an individual, resisting the comfort of conformity, and creating an art of living in harmony with nature. This soul-satisfying anthology of twelve favorite essays is a treasure.
In the title essay, Emerson writes about the extraordinary power of nature as a way of bringing the divine into our lives. In "Gifts," he reminds us that flowers and gold may be acceptable to those we love, but "the only gift is a portion of thyself." "Spiritual Laws" points out that because a higher law than our own rules the world, there is no need for struggle. Other essays include "Character," "Prudence," "Intellect," "Love," "Beauty," and "The American Scholar." Readers of all ages will want to keep this volume on hand to inspire and refresh the spirit
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Ralph Waldo Emerson The Major Prose
Upon its completion, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1971–2013) was hailed as a major achievement of scholarship and textual editing. Drawing from the ten volumes of the Collected Works, Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson have gathered some of Emerson’s most memorable prose published during his lifetime and under his direct supervision. The editors have enhanced those selections with additional writings to produce the only anthology that represents in a single volume the full range of Emerson’s written and spoken prose genres—sermons, lectures, addresses, and essays—that took on their public life in the pulpit or lecture hall, or on the printed page.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Prose demonstrates the remarkable scope of Emerson’s interests, from science, literature, art, philosophy, natural history, and religion to pressing social issues such as slavery and women’s rights, to the character of his contemporaries, including Lincoln and Thoreau. Emerson’s classic essays Nature, “Self-Reliance,” and “Experience” complement his less familiar but no less vital texts, including the deeply heterodox sermon on “The Lord’s Supper,” which effectively announced his resignation from the ministry, and late essays on “American Civilization,” “Character,” and “Works and Days.” Edited according to the most rigorous modern standards, Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Prose provides an authoritative compendium of writings by one of America’s most significant literary figures and public intellectuals.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, Lectures and Poems
A new, wide-ranging selection of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s most influential writings, this edition captures the essence of American Transcendentalism and illustrates the breadth of one of America’s greatest philosophers and poets.
The writings featured here show Emerson as a protester against social conformity, a lover of nature, an activist for the rights of women and slaves, and a poet of great sensitivity. As explored in this volume, Emersonian thought is a unique blend of belief in individual freedom and in humility before the power of nature. “I become a transparent eyeball,” Emerson wrote in Nature, “I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” Written over a century ago, this passage is a striking example of the passion and originality of Emerson’s ideas, which continue to serve as a spiritual center and an ideological base for modern thought.
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The Selected Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson
This is the first and only comprehensive selection of lectures by Ralph Waldo Emerson, his era’s most prominent American man of letters and one of the foremost architects of our intellectual culture. Based on authoritative texts selected and edited by Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson―the most experienced Emerson editors working today―these twenty-five addresses collectively exemplify the lecture style for which Emerson was famed in his day.
Best known to his contemporaries as a lecturer, Emerson delivered some 1,500 addresses over the course of his career. Because his most important ideas were worked out in his lectures, they provide the best record we have of his evolving thought―and thus are a key to our understanding of his essays and other printed works. Gathered here are lectures on American culture, literary theory and aesthetics, moral and, as Emerson called it, "intellectual" philosophy, and social and political reform. They are taken from speaking engagements in the United States and the British Isles over the period 1833-1871, during which Emerson often spent four to six months a year on the lecture circuit; lectures from the earliest years of Emerson’s career (1833-1842) have been newly edited for this volume.
The volume’s introduction draws on contemporary accounts to describe Emerson’s idiosyncratic but utterly memorable manner of speaking. A headnote provides context to the composition and delivery of each lecture, and footnotes identify Emerson’s allusions to persons, places, occasions, quotations, and books. "By examining his lectures and how they were delivered," say Bosco and Myerson, "we can look into the laboratory of Emerson’s intellectual and compositional process and see his published writings gestating."
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The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson VOL 1(Emerson, Ralph Waldo//Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson) (Volume 1)
This inaugural volume of a four-volume set marks the beginning of the publication of all 180 of the extant sermons composed and delivered by Emerson between the start of his ministerial career in 1826 and his final retirement from the pulpit in 1838.
Edited from manuscripts in the Houghton Library, Harvard University, the sermons are presented in chronological order in a clear text approximating as nearly as possible the original version read by Emerson to his congregation. The historical introduction by David M. Robinson gives a significant appraisal of Emerson's life between 1826 and 1838 and of his absorption in and reaction against the religious culture of his time.
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The Best Read Naturalist": Nature Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Environmental Humanities)
Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most important figures in American nature writing, yet until now readers have had no book devoted to this central theme in his work. "The Best Read Naturalist" fills this lacuna, placing several of Emerson’s lesser-known pieces of nature writing in conversation with his canonical essays. Organized chronologically, the thirteen selections―made up of sermons, lectures, addresses, and essays―reveal an engagement with natural history that spanned Emerson’s career. As we watch him grapple with what he called the "book of nature," a more environmentally connected thinker emerges―a "green" Emerson deeply concerned with the physical world and fascinated with the ability of science to reveal a correspondence between the order of nature and that of the mind. "The Best Read Naturalist" illuminates the vital influence that the study of natural history had on the development of Emerson’s mature philosophy.
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