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Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most crucial figures in the history of American thought, religion, and books. The vitality of his writings and the unsettling electric power of his example continue steadily to influence us greater than a century after his loss of life. Now Robert D. Richardson Jr. brings alive an Emerson completely different from the old stereotype of the passionless Sage of Concord. Pulling on a massive amount of new material, including correspondence on the list of Emerson brothers, Richardson offers us a worthwhile intellectual biography that is also a portrait of the complete man. These chapters present a suitor, a grief-stricken widower, an affectionate father, and a guy with an abiding genius for friendship. The fantastic spokesman for individualism and self-reliance turns out to own been a good neighbor, an activist citizen, a loyal sibling. Here is an Emerson who recognized how to laugh, who was self-doubting as well as self-reliant, and who became the best intellectual adventurer of his time. Richardson has, whenever you can, let Emerson speak for himself through his shared works, his many journals and notebooks, his words, his reported interactions. This isn't merely a analysis of Emerson's writing and his effect on others; it is Emerson's life as he experienced it. We start to see the failed minister, the battling writer, the political reformer, the poetic liberator. The Emerson of the book not only influenced Thoreau, Fuller, Whitman, Dickinson, and Frost, he also encouraged Nietzsche, William Wayne, Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Jorge Luis Borges. Emerson's timeliness is prolonged and stunning: his insistence that books and science are not separate civilizations, his focus on the worth of each individual, his respect for characteristics. Richardson gives attention to the gigantic selection of Emerson's readings - from Persian poets to George Fine sand - also to his many friendships and personal encounters - from Mary Moody Emerson to the Cherokee chiefs in Boston - evoking both the man and the times in which he lived. Throughout this book, Emerson's unquenchable vitality reaches across the years, and his hold on us endures.
