Emerson's Protégés: Mentoring and Marketing Transcendentalism's Future

Dowling, David O.

ISBN 10: 0300197446 / ISBN 13: 9780300197440

Published by Yale University Press, 2014

About this Item

XI, 332 pp. Pristine copy. Slight rubbing and at head tips and small divot on front cover head tip. Very clean and crisp otherwise.

Seller Inventory # 2864

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Emerson's Protégés: Mentoring and Marketing Transcendentalism's Future
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication Date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300197446
• ISBN 13: 9780300197440
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: FINE
• Seller catalogs:
  • Philosophy

About this title

Synopsis

In the late 1830s, Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist, poet, lecturer, and leader of the Transcendentalist movement, publicly called for a radical nationwide vocational reinvention, and an idealistic group of collegians eagerly responded. Assuming the role of mentor, editor, and promoter, Emerson freely offered them his time, financial support, and anti-materialistic counsel, and profoundly shaped the careers of his young acolytes―including Henry David Thoreau, renowned journalist and women’s rights advocate Margaret Fuller, and lesser-known literary figures such as Samuel Ward and reckless romantic poets Jones Very, Ellery Channing, and Charles Newcomb.
 
Author David Dowling’s history of the professional and personal relationships between Emerson and his protégés―a remarkable collaboration that alternately proved fruitful and destructive, tension-filled and liberating―is a fascinating true story of altruism, ego, influence, pettiness, genius, and the bold attempt to reshape the literary market of the mid-nineteenth century.

About the Author

David Dowling is assistant professor in the University of Iowa’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication and author of several books, most recently Literary Partnerships and the Marketplace: Writers and Mentors in Nineteenth-Century America. He lives in Iowa City.