Ralph Waldo Emerson

This collection of Emerson's essays covers the contents of two volumes originally published in 1841 and 1844. Annotation. Our most eloquent champion of individualism, Emerson acknowledges at the same time the countervailing pressures of society in American life. Even as he extols what he called "the great and crescive self," he dramatizes and records its vicissitudes. Here is a collection of his classic essays, including the exhortation to "Self-Reliance"...

In the eight regular journals and three miscellaneous notebooks of this volume is the record of fusions. This period of his life closes, as it opened, with 'acquiescence and optimism.'

An unabridged and unaltered republication of the first edition [1926].

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Emerson's treatise on the nature of friendship. "The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.

The American Scholar was a speech given by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1837, to the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College. Emerson argues that American culture, still heavily influenced by Europe, could build a new, distinctly American cultural identity. Emerson uses Transcendentalist and Romantic points of view to explain a true American scholar's relationship to nature. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. declared this speech to be America's Intellectual...