Description
Book SynopsisA seminal figure in American literature and philosophy, Ralph Waldo Emerson is considered the apostle of self-reliance, fully alive within his ideas and disarmingly confident about his innermost thoughts. This title draws on contemporary correspondence and diaries to reveal a young intellectual struggling to define himself and his principles.
Trade Review"A detailed, rigorous, yet highly readable and engaging story."--Library Journal "As Sacks shows, in his public lectures Emerson took pains not to seem too controversial... But standing before a closed circuit of his intellectual peers, he came out foursquare for a notion of scholarship that, for all its influence on American writers, transcended not only national but also institutional boundaries... Sacks is a classical historian and is very good at showing how well Emerson's mastery of classical rhetoric served him in this address... Reading Emerson's speech today, his turns of phrase may strike us as rather demure, but to his auditors they were fighting words."--Frank Wilson, The Philadelphia Inquirer "Sack's subtle and fine-meshed Understanding Emerson examines the circumstances in which Emerson's first major public statement ... took shape. Sacks shows how complicated the occasion was, and how easy it would have been ... for Emerson to fulfill the expectations of his audience and Alma Mater. Instead, he heeded the hopes of young friends like Thoreau and deliberately insulted almost everyone in the audience."--Christopher Benfey, Times Literary Supplement "Sacks's Emerson is very much a man of his milieu, a stubborn and driven Yankee... Sacks reveals Emerson as a struggling, uncertain figure, whose hunger to achieve self-reliance warred constantly against his need for approval from other quarters. His great effort of self-assertion seems more sympathetic, and less self-indulgent, when seen in this light."--Wilfred M. McClay, The Weekly Standard
