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The Selected Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson (two volumes)

Edited by Lawrence Rosenwald

“For several months I have been camping out in the mind of Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is a companionable, familiar, and yet endlessly stimulating place, and, since his mind is stronger than mine, I keep referring to his wisdom, even his doubts, and quite shamelessly identifying with him. All this started when I came across in a local bookstore the new, two-volume edition of his Selected Journals, published by Library of America, and I decided to give it a whirl. Some 1,900 pages later, I am in thrall to, in love with, Mr. Emerson.”—Phillip Lopate, Harper’s

Overview

Overview

Interviews Eyeball and Over-Soul: Biographer James Marcus on the Infinitude of Ralph Waldo Emerson
May 24, 2024

Interviews The Transcendentalists and Their World: Robert A. Gross on why Concord matters
October 5, 2022

The Library of America presents the most ample and comprehensive nonspecialist edition of Emerson’s great work ever published—one that retains the original order in which he composed his thoughts and preserves the dramatic range of his unique style in long, uninterrupted passages, but without the daunting critical apparatus of the 16-volume scholarly edition.

The first volume begins with Emerson’s first journal entry, on January 25, 1820, in a homemade booklet he titled The Wide World, and follows him through his early years at Harvard College and the Divinity School, his ordination as a Unitarian minister, his marriage to Ellen Tucker and her untimely death, his fateful decision to leave the ministry, and his travels in England and on the Continent. It offers an irreplaceable perspective on the intellectual currents of the day—the emergence of Transcendentalism; the furor over Emerson’s “Divinity School Address”; the founding of The Dial; experiments in communal living at Fruitlands and Brook Farm—and intimate sketches of Emerson’s friends and contemporaries, including Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Thomas Carlyle, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others.

The second volume opens with an Emerson at the height of his powers, soon to write his celebrated essays “Experience” and “Self-Reliance,” and in the midst of a vibrant intellectual circle. It follows his anguished reactions to the nation’s intensifying political turmoil: his anger at the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, his antislavery activism, and his day-to-day experience of the Civil War (including a wartime trip to Washington, D.C., where he met President Lincoln). Along the way, he laments untimely losses: his first-born son Waldo at the age of five, and his friends Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller. By the end of his life, Emerson was a revered national figure; the volume includes his final journal writings.

Edited by *Lawrence Rosenwald*—Anne Pierce Rogers Professor of American Literature at Wellesley College and author of _Emerson and the Art of the Diary_—each volume includes a 16-page portfolio of images of Emerson and his contemporaries, a note on the selections, extensive notes, biographical sketches, a chronology, and an index.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Project support for both volumes was provided by The Gould Family Foundation and The Berkley Foundation.

Both volumes of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Journals are kept in print by a gift from The Berkley Foundation to the Guardians of American Letters Fund.

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1930 pages

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