Description
Book SynopsisRalph 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. This work gives us a portrait of the whole man.
Trade Review"Richardson’s 671-page biography of Emerson is a page turner. The adventures are the adventures of a reader. And, of course, a thinker, a writer." * Los Angeles Times *
"A worthy addition to the library of books on one of America's foremost thinkers." * New York Times *
"Richardson balances the often chilling puritanism of Emerson's writing with a portrait of the man as hungry for friendship, maintaining close relationships with Carlisle, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott and Margaret Fuller; and whose icy doctrine of individualism reflects the loneliness caused by the premature deaths of his beloved first wife, his two younger brothers and numerous friends." * Publishers Weekly *
"A captivating account of the originality, creativity, and genius of the American Coleridge." * Library Journal *
“An electrifying work . . . a phenomenal piece of portraiture” * New York Newsday *
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Emerson: The Mind on Fire is an unusually intelligent and involving book. Richardson himself writes with grace, vigor, acuity, and imagination. No other recent critic of Emerson . . . has written so well. This book is equal to the best American literary biographies we have and is arguably the best single book on Emerson ever written." * Journal of American History *
"What Richardson has produced . . . a valuable, perhaps indispensable, paean to the intellectual life: we emerge from a reading of it fairly staggered by Emerson's sustained energy-even through his moments of doubt-and by the uncompromising honesty of Emerson's engagements with himself, with literature, nature, and society." * American Literature *
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The Mind on Fire integrates heart and head without ever confusing the two; it presents exciting readings of Emerson's major works; it reveals a productive emotional vitality in ways never before shown; it is learned, accurate, judicious, and comprehensive, crisp in its conclusions, poetic in its language, too respectful of its subject ever to make him stodgy. The book is aptly titled, with its allusion to Emerson's volcanic metaphor for the creative mind, for Richardson's book truly fires the imagination." * New England Quarterly *
"One of the great achievements in contemporary American literary studies. . . . Aside from his learning, which is prodigious, Richardson writes a wonderfully fluent, agile prose; he has a poet's sense of nuance and a novelist's grasp of dramatic rhythm; he also displays a positive genius for apt quotation." -- John Banville, * New York Review of Books *
