The Selected Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson

by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Joel Myerson (Editor)

Overview

In 1939 Columbia University Press published the acclaimed first volume of The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, which presented a deeply personal portrait of the real Emerson, previously unknown to the American public. Through these letters readers gained a new insight into the mind of this seminal figure in American literary and intellectual history. Now, for the first time, readers can find Emerson's best letters distilled in one volume. Distinguished Emerson scholar Joel Myerson has selected 350 letters written between 1813 and 1880 that best represents the scope of Emerson's correspondence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231102827
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	01/01/1998
Pages:	480
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.19(d)

About the Author

Joel Myerson is former president of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society and the Carolina Distinguished Professor of American Literature at the University of South Carolina. He has written and edited numerous books on nineteenth-century American writers.

What People are Saying About This

David M. Robinson

An expertly selected and edited collection that includes some of Emerson's best writings. Highly accessible, it will become one of the volumes to which both the general reader and the scholar will turn first for information on Emerson and New England literary culture.

— David M. Robinson, author of Emerson and the Conduct of Life

Editorial Reviews

An expertly selected and edited collection that includes some of Emerson's best writings. Highly accessible, it will become one of the volumes to which both the general reader and the scholar will turn first for information on Emerson and New England literary culture.

David M. Robinson

The time is ripe to present Emerson in a fresh light. This is Joel Myerson´s design in editing Selected Letters. . . . Emerson´s journals and essays are his spirits 'straight up.´

Los Angeles Times

By his skillful editing, Myerson has fabricated out of Emerson´s own words a striking portrait of one of the most compelling and elusive figures of the nineteenth century.

Journal of American History

Emerson, who followed Montaigne in never overvaluing reading, is now interred under 38 volumes of lectures, letters, journals and notebooks. For those daunted by the Ralph L. Rusk edition of 4500 letters (also published by Columbia), Myerson has done a great service by compiling 350 of Emerson's most essential, which together form the outline of an illuminating intellectual biography. The most devoted reader of Emerson's essays can become exasperated by the gulf that separates the thrill of his rhetoric from the mundane necessity of everyday life; and the letters don't exactly bridge the gap. Even when most intimate, Emerson's letters reflect the distance of the Sage. Nonetheless, Emerson's life was touched repeatedly by terrible lossthe death of his first wife, the increasing mental debilitation of his brother Edward, the sudden death of his beloved son Waldoand at every turn, that characteristic tone of hortatory anticipation deepens to comprehend it, ultimately reaffirming Emerson's abiding belief in the universe's unyielding principle of "Compensation." Emerson was a grumpy, reluctant traveler and generally preferred solitude, so his letters serve as a record of condition, rather than of incident. Nonetheless, they can be enthralling. The Byronisms of the undergraduate give way to the preachy and orotund Emerson of his twenties, until finally, in his early thirties, the Emerson we know appears: "Purge off life's accidents," he writes a former student, advising him to obey "the aboriginal truthThe Fall of man is the disesteem of man." This is an indispensable resource for the student of Emerson. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

From the 4500 letters Emerson wrote during his long career and which Ralph L. Rusk first began publishing free of cosmetic editing only in 1939, Myerson, former president of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society and currently Carolina Distinguished Professor of American Literature at the University of South Carolina, has here selected 350 that, together, offer a vivid and accurate picture of this essential figure in American literature. Preceded by a helpful chronology and brief biographies of Emerson's correspondents, the letters are remarkable for their candor and diversity. To his aunt Mary Moody Emerson, instrumental in Emerson's intellectual development, he begins, at age ten, to confide those thoughts that would later emerge as radical Transcendental doctrine, using her as a sounding board until his own middle age. Here, too, are his adoring letters to Thomas Carlyle, whose publication in America he undertook to facilitate; affectionate letters to Margaret Fuller, whom he thereby coaxed into editing The Dial; family updates on his children Waldo, Edith, and Ellen to older brother William; loving reports from here and abroad to his second wife, Lidian; and even a set of letters to Emma Lazarus urging her not to submit her poems the Atlantic until she has revised them. This is the essential one-volume collection of Emerson's letters. Recommended for all libraries.Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, Mo.

Library Journal

For scholars who have, or want, a life beyond Emerson studies, distills the ten volumes and 4,500 letters in the 1939 collection to 350 that Myerson has selected as the most enduring. Written between 1813 and 1880, they include letters to Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, his wife and brothers, and friends like Longfellow and Whitman. Support material includes a chronology, biographies of correspondents, and an index of names. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Booknews

Myerson's selection of Emerson's letters is the ideal book for either those who already know the famous writer's work or those who would like to learn more about the great Transcendentalist.... An outstanding collection.

Dallas Morning News