Biography on ralph waldo emerson book

Ralph waldo emerson famous works

There are numerous books on Ralph Waldo Emerson, and it comes with good reason, he was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet who led the Transcendentalism movement of the midth century, which taught that divinity pervades all nature and humanity. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can.

Tomorrow is a new day. 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. 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, and 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. We see the failed minister, the struggling writer, the political reformer, the poetic liberator. Emerson once wrote that the times we are born in are the best of times, if only we know what to do with them.

In the midst of this swirl of upheaval and change, Emerson turned his attention inward to the citizen, the individual, who must find his or her own inmost truth and bring that one fact of being to perfect expression in the world — and must learn to believe the faintest presentiment of the self against the testimony of all history.