Author: Sandra Harbert Petrulionis
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609380878
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 315
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Book Description
The forty-nine recollections gathered in Thoreau in His Own Time demonstrate that it was those who knew him personally, rather than his contemporary literati, who most prized Thoreau's message, but even those who disparaged him respected his unabashed example of an unconventional life. Included are comments by Ralph Waldo Emerson--friend, mentor, Walden landlord, and progenitor of the spin on Thoreau's posthumous reputation; Nathaniel Hawthorne, who could not compliment Thoreau without simultaneously denigrating him; and John Weiss, whose extended commentary on Thoreau's spirituality reflects unusual tolerance. Selections from the correspondence of Caroline Healey Dall, Maria Thoreau, Sophia Hawthorne, Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, and Amanda Mather amplify our understanding of the ways in which nineteenth-century women viewed Thoreau. An excerpt by John Burroughs, who alternately honored and condemned Thoreau, asserts his view that Thoreau was ever searching for the unattainable.
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Publisher: FV Éditions
ISBN: 2366688199
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 35
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Book Description
"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."
Author: Robert D. Richardson
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587298422
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 113
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Book Description
Writing was the central passion of Emerson’s life. While his thoughts on the craft are well developed in “The Poet,” “The American Scholar,” Nature, “Goethe,” and “Persian Poetry,” less well known are the many pages in his private journals devoted to the relationship between writing and reading. Here, for the first time, is the Concord Sage’s energetic, exuberant, and unconventional advice on the idea of writing, focused and distilled by the preeminent Emerson biographer at work today. Emerson advised that “the way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent.” First We Read, Then We Write contains numerous such surprises—from “every word we speak is million-faced” to “talent alone cannot make a writer”—but it is no mere collection of aphorisms and exhortations. Instead, in Robert Richardson’s hands, the biographical and historical context in which Emerson worked becomes clear. Emerson’s advice grew from his personal experience; in practically every moment of his adult life he was either preparing to write, trying to write, or writing. Richardson shows us an Emerson who is no granite bust but instead is a fully fleshed, creative person disarmingly willing to confront his own failures. Emerson urges his readers to try anything—strategies, tricks, makeshifts—speaking not only of the nuts and bolts of writing but also of the grain and sinew of his determination. Whether a writer by trade or a novice, every reader will find something to treasure in this volume. Fearlessly wrestling with “the birthing stage of art,” Emerson’s counsel on being a reader and writer will be read and reread for years to come.
Author: Maurice York
Publisher: Wrightwood Press
ISBN: 0980119006
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
Emerson once wrote that the times we are born in are the best of times, if only we know what to do with them. His life spanned the crucial years of the nation's youth-the first tests of its shop-new Constitution; the explosive expansion into the untamed West; the great conflagration of the Civil War and the destruction of slavery; and the pains of rebirth and reconciliation that carried the United States to the eve of emerging as a world power. 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-must learn to believe the faintest presentiment of the self against the testimony of all history. As a lecturer and essayist, Emerson was a catalyst who sought through his daily work to wake the long-slumbering soul of the farmer, mechanic, businessman, politician-to show the common person that the divine and extraordinary are present in every hour of the day. His efforts triggered a cultural tidal wave, inspiring a generation of authors, poets, teachers, and social activists who built the very foundations of culture in America. This biography takes a fresh look at Emerson through his Journals to trace the story of his own self-development, and the hidden life's work that makes him as relevant to our time as to his own.
Author: Robert D. Richardson Jr.
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520918371
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 705
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Book Description
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.
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674248625
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 612
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Book Description
This volume offers the reader the heart of Emerson's journals, that extraordinary series of diaries and notebooks in which he poured out his thoughts for over 50 years. Drawing from Harvard's 16-volume scholarly edition of the journals--but omitting the textual apparatus--Porte presents a sympathetic selection that brings us close to Emerson the man.
Author: Robert D. Habich
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587299631
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
By the end of the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson was well on his way to becoming the “Wisest American” and the “Sage of Concord,” a literary celebrity and a national icon. With that fame came what Robert Habich describes as a blandly sanctified version of Emerson held widely by the reading public. Building Their Own Waldos sets out to understand the dilemma faced by Emerson’s early biographers: how to represent a figure whose subversive individualism had been eclipsed by his celebrity, making him less a representative of his age than a caricature of it. Drawing on never-before-published letters, diaries, drafts, business records, and private documents, Habich explores the making of a cultural hero through the stories of Emerson’s first biographers— George Willis Cooke, a minister most recently from Indianapolis who considered himself a disciple; the English reformer and newspaper mogul Alexander Ireland, a friend for half a century; Moncure D. Conway, a Southern abolitionist then residing in London, who called Emerson his “spiritual father and intellectual teacher”; the poet and medical professor Oliver Wendell Holmes, with Emerson a member of Boston’s gathering of literary elite, the Saturday Club; James Elliot Cabot, the family’s authorized biographer, an architect and amateur philosopher with unlimited access to Emerson’s unpublished papers; and Emerson’s son Edward, a physician and painter whose father had passed over him as literary executor in favor of Cabot. Just as their biographies reveal a complex, socially engaged Emerson, so too do the biographers’ own stories illustrate the real-world perils, challenges, and motives of life-writing in the late nineteenth century, when biographers were routinely vilified as ghoulish and disreputable and biography as a genre underwent a profound redefinition. Building Their Own Waldos is at once a revealing look at Emerson’s constructed reputation, a case study in the rewards and dangers of Victorian life-writing, and the story of six authors struggling amidst personal misfortunes and shifting expectations to capture the elusive character of America’s “representative man,” as they knew him and as they needed him to be.
Author: Tyler Green
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 3791378694
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
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.
Author: Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022626520X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 633
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Book Description
“An exceptionally accessible” new translation of “the lively and urgent writings of one of classical antiquity’s most important ethicists” (Choice). The Roman statesman and philosopher Seneca (4 BCE–65 CE) recorded his moral philosophy and reflections on life as a highly original kind of correspondence. Letters on Ethics includes vivid descriptions of town and country life in Nero’s Italy, discussions of poetry and oratory, and philosophical training for Seneca’s friend Lucilius. This volume, the first complete English translation in nearly a century, makes the Letters more accessible than ever before. Written as much for a general audience as for Lucilius, these engaging letters offer advice on how to deal with everything from nosy neighbors to sickness, pain, and death. Seneca uses the informal format of the letter to present the central ideas of Stoicism, for centuries the most influential philosophical system in the Mediterranean world. His lively and at times humorous expositions have made the Letters his most popular work and an enduring classic. Including an introduction and explanatory notes by Margaret Graver and A. A. Long, this authoritative edition will captivate a new generation of readers.
Author: Robert Cartwright Gordon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 302
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Book Description
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882, American essayist and poet.
