Top

Amazon no longer offers textbook rentals. We do!

Emerson : Selected Essays

by: Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Emerson : Selected Essays

by: Emerson, Ralph Waldo

ISBN 13:
9780140390131
ISBN 10:
0140390138
Edition: Reprint
Format: Paperback
Copyright: 04/29/1982
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Newer Edition

Rent

Sorry, this item is currently unavailable.

Free Shipping On Every Order

Note: Supplemental materials are not guaranteed with Rental or Used book purchases.

Extend or Purchase Your Rental at Any Time

Need to keep your rental past your due date? At any time before your due date you can extend or purchase your rental through your account.

Emerson : Selected Essays > ISBN13: 9780140390131

Summary

A representative selection from the writings of Emerson examines topics, including self-reliance, fate, nature, poetry, Napoleon, and Henry David Thoreau

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.

Introduction

(22)

Larzer Ziff

Suggestions for Further Reading

(2)

A Note on the Text

(4)

ESSAYS

Nature 1836

(48)

The American Scholar 1837

(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

Supplemental Materials

What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.