Nature and Selected Essays

by Emerson, Ralph Waldo

• ISBN13: 9780142437629
• ISBN10: 014243762X
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780593512258
• Additional ISBN(s): 9780140390131
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-05-27
• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• More Book Details

Summary

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 the domestication of, nature, and for 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. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the son of a Unitarian minister and a chaplain during the American Revolution, was born in 1803 in Boston. He attended the Boston Latin School, and in 1817 entered Harvard, graduating in 1820. Emerson supported himself as a schoolteacher from 1821-26. In 1826 he was "approbated to preach," and in 1829 became pastor of the Scond Church (Unitarian) in Boston. That same year he married Ellen Louise Tucker, who was to die of tuberculosis only seventeen months later. In 1832 Emerson resigned his pastorate and traveled to Eurpe, where he met Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle. He settled in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1834, where he began a new career as a public lecturer, and married Lydia Jackson a year later. A group that gathered around Emerson in Concord came to be known as "the Concord school," and included Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller. Every year Emerson made a lecture tour; and these lectures were the source of most of his essays. Nature (1836), his first published work, contained the essence of his transcendental philosophy , which views the world of phenomena as a sort of symbol of the inner life and emphasizes individual freedom and self-reliance. Emerson's address to the Phi Beta Kappa society of Harvard (1837) and another address to the graduating class of the Harvard Divinity School (1838) applied his doctrine to the scholar and the clergyman, provoking sharp controversy. An ardent abolitionist, Emerson lectured and wrote widely against slavery from the 1840's through the Civil War. His principal publications include two volumes of Essays (1841, 1844), Poems (1847), Representative Men (1850), The Conduct of Life (1860), and Society and Solitude (1870). He died of pneumonia in 1882 and was buried in Concord.

Larzer Ziff is a research professor of English at Johns Hopkins University who has written extensively on American literary culture.

Table of Contents

Introduction	7	(29)
Larzer Ziff
Suggestions for Further Reading	29	(2)
A Note on the Text	31	(4)
ESSAYS
Nature 1836	35	(48)
The American Scholar 1837	83	(24)
An Address Delivered Before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge 1838	107	(22)
Man the Reformer 1841	129	(20)
History (Essays, First Series) 1841	149	(26)
Self-Reliance (Essays, First Series) 1841	175	(30)
The Over-Soul (Essays, First Series) 1841	205	(20)
Circles (Essays, First Series) 1841	225	(14)
The Transcendentalist 1842	239	(20)
The Poet (Essays, Second Series) 1844	259	(26)
Experience (Essays, Second Series) 1844	285	(28)
Montaigne; Or, the Skeptic (Representative Men) 1850	313	(24)
Napoleon; Or, the Man of the World (Representative Men) 1850	337	(24)
Fate (The Conduct of Life) 1860	361	(32)
Thoreau 1862	393