Essays and Lectures: (Nature: Addresses and Lectures, Essays: First and Second Series, Representative Men, English Traits, and The Conduct of Life) - Softcover

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1420933345 ISBN 13: 9781420933345

Publisher: Digireads.com, 2009

Synopsis

American essayist, philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson was a leading figure in the 19th century Transcendentalism movement. A champion of individualism and persistent critic of social pressures, Emerson was an influential American figure whose philosophy is embodied in the numerous essays he wrote and lectures he gave. This volume brings together an extensive selection of those essays and lectures. "Essays and Lectures" is a robust representation of Emerson's writings in which you will find the following individual works: "Nature: Addresses and Lectures"; "Essays: First and Second Series"; "Representative Men"; "English Traits"; and "The Conduct of Life".

About this title

About the Author

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the son of a Unitarian minister and a chaplain during the American Revolution, was born in 1803 in Boston. He attended the Boston Latin School, and in 1817 entered Harvard, graduating in 1820. Emerson supported himself as a schoolteacher from 1821-26. In 1826 he was "approbated to preach," and in 1829 became pastor of the Scond Church (Unitarian) in Boston. That same year he married Ellen Louise Tucker, who was to die of tuberculosis only seventeen months later. In 1832 Emerson resigned his pastorate and traveled to Eurpe, where he met Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle. He settled in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1834, where he began a new career as a public lecturer, and married Lydia Jackson a year later. A group that gathered around Emerson in Concord came to be known as "the Concord school," and included Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller. Every year Emerson made a lecture tour; and these lectures were the source of most of his essays. Nature (1836), his first published work, contained the essence of his transcendental philosophy, which views the world of phenomena as a sort of symbol of the inner life and emphasizes individual freedom and self-reliance. Emerson's address to the Phi Beta Kappa society of Harvard (1837) and another address to the graduating class of the Harvard Divinity School (1838) applied his doctrine to the scholar and the clergyman, provoking sharp controversy. An ardent abolitionist, Emerson lectured and wrote widely against slavery from the 1840's through the Civil War. His principal publications include two volumes of Essays (1841, 1844), Poems (1847), Representative Men (1850), The Conduct of Life (1860), and Society and Solitude (1870). He died of pneumonia in 1882 and was buried in Concord.

Edition details

• Publisher: Digireads.com
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1420933345
• ISBN 13: 9781420933345
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 596