University of California Pr Labirint Ozon. Emerson : The Mind on Fire. Robert D. 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, 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.
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 readingsโfrom Persian poets to George Sandโand to his many friendships and personal encountersโfrom Mary Moody Emerson to the Cherokee chiefs in Bostonโevoking 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. A White Day in My Years. A Theory of Animated Nature. The Symposium 41 The Forging of. Human Culture 46 The Peace.
