Nature and Selected Essays

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Overview

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid 19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays & correspondence and more than 1,500 public lectures and speeches across the United States. Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays & correspondence and speeches encompasses a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability of humankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures and speeches first, then revised them for print. This anthology volume contains Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature and it also includes his first two collections of essays, Essays: First and Second Series which were originally published in 1841 and 1844 respectively. Nature, and Essays: First and Second Series represent the core of Ralph Waldo Emerson's thinking, and include his well known essays Self-Reliance, History, Spiritual Laws, and Love, just to name a few. In Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson puts forth the foundation of transcendentalism, a belief system that espouses a non-traditional appreciation of nature. Whether derived from an Emerson speech, lecture, essay, or correspondence, this edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson's work is an invaluable literature compilation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781537056432
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	08/21/2016
Pages:	390
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

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 ofEssays (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
Suggestions for Further Reading   29
A Note on the Text   31

Essays

1. Nature 1836   35

2. The American Scholar 1837   83

3. An Address Delivered Before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge 1838   107

4. Man the Reformer 1841   129

5. History (Essays, First Series) 1841   149

6. Self-Reliance (Essays, First Series) 1841   175

7. The Over-Soul (Essays, First Series) 1841   205

8. Circles (Essays, First Series) 1841   225

9. The Transcendentalist 1842   239

10. The Poet (Essays, Second Series) 1844   259

11. Experience (Essays, Second Series) 1844   285

12. Montaigne; Or, the Skeptic (Representative Men) 1850   313

13. Napoleon; Or, the Man of the World (Representative Men) 1850   337

14. Fate (The Conduct of Life) 1860   361

15. Thoreau 1862   393
    

Editorial Reviews

To assist the Nature Conservancy's "Plant a Billion Trees Campaign," which aims to put the trees in Brazil's Atlantic Forest, Penguin is rereleasing a handful of nature classics.

—Michael Rogers

Library Journal