Books by Ralph Waldo Emerson

The twelfth volume makes available nine of Emerson's lecture notebooks, covering a span of twenty-seven years, from 1835 to 1862, from apprenticeship to fame. These notebooks contain materials Emerson collected for the composition of his lectures, articles, and essays during those years.

Emerson's journals of 1847-1848 deal primarily with his second visit to Europe, occasioned by a British lecture tour. The journals, notebooks, and letters of these years recorded materials for lectures that Emerson composed abroad and shortly after his return to Concord, and ultimately for English Traits, which he was to publish in 1856.

Emerson, Alfred Kazin observes in his Introduction, "was a great writer who turned the essay into a form all his own." His celebrated essays are here presented for the first time in an authoritative one-volume edition, which incorporates all the changes and corrections Emerson made after their initial publication.

This searching and distinctive portrayal of English culture offers a revealing perspective on American viewpoints and preoccupations in the mid-19th century. It is also notable for revealing an interesting side of Emerson's complex character; here we find a practical Yankee, analyzing English power, resourcefulness, determination, and materialism.

Emerson's second essay collection appeared in 1844. It includes eight essays-"The Poet," "Experience," "Character," "Manners," "Gifts," "Nature," "Politics," and "Nominalist and Realist"-and one address, "New England Reformers." These essays have a lightness of tone and an irony absent from the earlier writings, but are no less memorable.

Some of Emerson's most famous essays, such as "Self-Reliance," "Compensation," and "The Over-Soul," appeared in his Essays of 1841. This edition provides the authoritative text of the Essays, with an introduction, notes, and supplementary material valuable for studying the evolution of Emerson's thought and style.

Society and Solitude, published in 1870, was the first collection of essays Emerson had put into press since The Conduct of Life 10 years earlier. This edition is based on holograph manuscripts and published sources. The text incorporates corrections and revisions he recorded in both sources-thus restoring for the reader the text he actually wrote.

Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson have gathered Emerson's most memorable prose published under his direct supervision, enhanced by additional writings. Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Prose is the only single-volume anthology that presents the full range of Emerson's written and spoken prose-sermons, lectures, addresses, and essays.

Emerson remains one of America's least understood writers, having spawned neither school nor follower. Those wishing to discover or reacquaint themselves with Emerson's writings but who have not known where or how to begin will not find a better starting place or more reliable guide than David Mikics in this richly illustrated Annotated Emerson.

At the time of his death in 1882, Ralph Waldo Emerson was counted among the greatest poets in nineteenth-century America. This variorum edition of all the poems published during his lifetime offers the reader the opportunity to situate Emerson's poetic achievement alongside his celebrated essays and to consider their interrelationship.

A comprehensive collection of Emerson's writings against slavery and the subjugation of American Indians - writings that reveal Emerson's deep commitment to social reform. Included are 18 works by Emerson, including speeches and lectures, on the subject of slavery, written between 1838 and 1863.

As Judith Shklar has pointed out, Emerson built Representative Men around the principle of 'rotation,' which had become a political axiom in Jacksonian America-the idea that no man, no matter how imposing, should be accorded permanent authority. Representative Men honors the language of democracy in its very title.

Brings together Emerson's literary criticism from a wide variety of sources. Intended for the student as well as the researcher, this book amply illustrates Alfred Kazin's contention that Ralph Waldo Emerson was "one of the shrewdest critics who ever lived".