Building Their Own Waldos : Emerson's First Biographers and the Politics of Life-Writing in the Gilded Age

by Habich, Robert D.

• ISBN13: 9781587299629
• ISBN10: 1587299623
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-03-15
• Publisher: Univ of Iowa Pr

Summary

@font-face { font-family: "Calibri"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }h4 { margin: 12pt 0in 3pt; page-break-after: avoid; font-size: 14pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }span.Heading4Char { font-family: Calibri; font-weight: bold; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } 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 Waldossets out to understand the dilemma faced by Emersonrs"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 Emersonrs"s First Biographers explores the making of a cultural hero through the stories of Emersonrs"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 Bostonrs"s gathering of literary elite, the Saturday Club; James Elliot Cabot, the familyrs"s authorized biographer, an architect and amateur philosopher with unlimited access to Emersonrs"s unpublished papers; and Emersonrs"s son Edward, a physician and painter whose father had passed over him as literary executor in favor of Cabot.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 biographersrs" 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 Waldosis at once a revealing look at Emersonrs"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 Americars"s "representative man," as they knew him and as they needed him to be.

Author Biography

Robert D. Habich is a professor of English at Ball State University, in Muncie, Indiana and President-Elect of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society. He is coauthor (with Robert C. Nowatzki) of Romanticism and Transcendentalism, 1820-1865, editor of Lives out of Letters: Essays on American Literary Biography and Documentation in Honor of Robert N. Hudspeth, and author of Transcendentalism and the Western Messenger: A History of the Magazine and Its Contributors, 1835-1841.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction: Building Their Own Waldos	p. xiii
Abbreviations	p. xxvii
A Genre in Transition: Biography in the 1880s	p. 1
An Act of Wholesome and Pure-hearted Admiration: Emerson's First Biographer, George Willis Cooke	p. 13
Biographers and the Pornographer: Conway, Ireland, and ôEmerson and His Friendsö	p. 39
Diagnosing the Gentle Iconoclast: Dr. Holmes on Emerson	p. 73
Authorizing Emerson's Biography: Cabot and/or Edward Emerson	p. 99
Shelf Life: The Legacy of Emerson's First Biographies	p. 121
Notes	p. 135
Bibliography	p. 169
Index	p. 181
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