Ralph Waldo Emerson(1803-1882) settled in Concord, Massachusetts,
in 1834, where he began a career as a public lecturer. Every year
Emerson made a lecture tour, the source of most of his essays. His
principal publications include Nature(1836),two volumes of Essays
(1841, 1844), Poems (1847), Representative Men (1850), The Conduct
of Life (1860), and Society and Solitude (1870).
Joel Porte(1933-2006), volume editor, won the Bowdoin Prize in 1962
for his essay on Emerson, and was granted the Distinguished
Achievement Award by the Emerson Society in 2006. He authored many
studies of nineteenth-century and modern literature,
includingEmerson and Thoreau- Transcendentalists in Conflict, The
Romance in America, andRepresentative Man- Ralph Waldo Emerson in
his Time.
“The Emerson who speaks to us through these essays understood America as few have done before or since. By nature a dualistic thinker, he fully realized the polarities of American experience—between action and reflection, self-reliance and community, unity and diversity, idealism and materialism, past and future…. In doing so, he tried to forge a new identity for the new representative American—serene, self-confident, democratic, progressive and pluralistic.” —St. Petersburg Times
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