Back Essays & Lectures

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays & Lectures

Nature; Addresses, and Lectures | Essays: First and Second Series | Representative Men | English Traits | The Conduct of Life More

Edited by Joel Porte

“The Emerson who speaks to us through these essays understood America as few have done before or since. By nature a dualistic thinker, he fully realized the polarities of American experience—between action and reflection, self-reliance and community, unity and diversity, idealism and materialism, past and future…. In doing so, he tried to forge a new identity for the new representative American—serene, self-confident, democratic, progressive and pluralistic.” — St. Petersburg Times

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

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

News “He loved a broad margin to his life”: Maxine Hong Kingston on Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson
July 20, 2023

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

This first Library of America volume of Emerson’s writing covers the most productive period of his life, 1832–1860. 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 are the indispensable and most renowned works, including “The American Scholar” (“our intellectual Declaration of Independence,” as Oliver Wendell Holmes called it), “The Divinity School Address,” considered atheistic by many of his listeners, the summons to “Self-Reliance,” along with the more embattled realizations of “Circles” and, especially, “Experience.” Here, too, are his wide-ranging portraits of Montaigne, Shakespeare, and other “representative men,” and his astute observations on the habits, lives, and prospects of the English and American people.

This volume includes Emerson’s well-known Nature; Addresses, and Lectures (1849), his Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844), plus Representative Men (1850), English Traits (1856), and his later book of essays, The Conduct of Life (1860). These are the works that established Emerson’s colossal reputation in America and found him admirers abroad as diverse as Carlyle, Nietzsche, and Proust.

Emerson’s enduring power is apparent everywhere in American literature: in those, like Whitman and some of the major twentieth-century poets, who seek to corroborate his vision, and among those, like Hawthorne and Melville, who questioned, qualified, and struggled with it. Emerson’s vision reverberates also in the tradition of American philosophy, notably in the writings of William James and John Dewey, in the works of his European admirers, such as Nietzsche, and in the avant-garde theorists of our own day who write on the nature and function of language. The reasons for Emerson’s durability will be obvious to any reader who follows the exhilarating, exploratory movements of his mind in this uniquely full gathering of his work.

Not merely another selection of his essays, this volume includes all his major books in their rich entirety. No other volume conveys so comprehensively the exhilaration and exploratory energy of perhaps America’s greatest writer.

Joel Porte (1933–2006), volume editor, won the Bowdoin Prize in 1962 for his essay on Emerson, and was granted the Distinguished Achievement Award by the Emerson Society in 2006. He authored many studies of nineteenth-century and modern literature, including Emerson and Thoreau: Transcendentalists in Conflict, The Romance in America, and Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Time.

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.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays & Lectures is kept in print by a gift from Joyce and Seward Johnson and India Blake to the Guardians of American Letters Fund, made in memory of Milton Murat Horton.
News & Views

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

News “He loved a broad margin to his life”: Maxine Hong Kingston on Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson
July 20, 2023

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

Influences Cheston Knapp: Weird, feral Ralph Waldo Emerson, wily William Gass, and other influences on Up Up, Down Down
February 7, 2018

News John Matteson on the “alternately repelling and attracting” electricity between Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson
November 21, 2017
Table of Contents

Nature; Addresses, and Lectures

Nature
Introduction
Nature
Commodity
Beauty
Language
Discipline
Idealism
Spirit
Prospects

Addresses
The American Scholar. An Oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837
An Address to the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, July 15, 1838
Literary Ethics. An Address to the Literary Societies in Dartmouth College, July 24, 1838
The Method of Nature. An Adress to the Society of the Adelphi, in Waterville College, Maine, August 11, 1841

Lectures
Man the Reformer. A Lecture read before the Mechanics’ Apprentices’ Library Association, Boston, January, 25, 1841
Introductory Lecture on the Times. Read in the Masonic Temple, Boston, December 2, 1841
The Conservative. A Lecture read in the Masonic Temple, Boston, December 9, 1841.
The Transcendentalist. A Lecture read in the Masonic Temple, Boston, January, 1842
The Young American. A Lecture read to the Mercantile Library Association, in Boston, February 7, 1844.

Essays: First Series
History
Self-Reliance
Compensation
Spiritual Laws
Love
Friendship
Prudence
Heroism
The Over-Soul
Circles
Intellect
Art

Essays: Second Series
The Poet
Experience
Character
Manners
Gifts
Nature
Politics
Nominalist and Realist
New England Reformers, Lecture at Amory Hall

Representative Men
I. Uses of Great Men
II. Plato; or, the Philosopher Plato: New Readings
III. Swedenborg; or, the Mystic
IV. Montaigne; or, the Skeptic
V. Shakespeare; or, the Poet
VI. Napoleon; or, the Man of the World
VII. Goethe; or, the Writer

English Traits
First Visit to England
Voyage to England
Land
Race
Ability
Manners
Truth
Character
Cockayne
Wealth
Aristocracy
Universities
Religion
Literature
The “Times”
Stonehenge
Personal
Result
Speech at Manchester

The Conduct of Life
Fate
Power
Wealth
Culture
Behavior
Worship
Considerations by the Way
Beauty
Illusions

28.00 List Price: $40.00 (Save: 30%) Free shipping on orders $50 and over

Or buy from our partners

Phone orders: 1-800-964-5778 Request product #200164

ISBN: 978-0-94045015-8 1150 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 15 Library of America Series

Subscribers can purchase the slipcased edition by signing in to their accounts.

Related Books

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Journals 1820–1842 LOA N°201

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Journals 1841–1877 LOA N°202

Walt Whitman: Poetry & Prose LOA N°3

Henry David Thoreau: A Week, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod LOA N°28

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Collected Poems & Translations LOA N°70

Library of America

CURATOR

A champion of America’s great writers and timeless works, Library of America guides readers in finding and exploring the exceptional writing that reflects the nation’s history and culture.

Learn More

PUBLISHER

From poetry, novels, and memoirs to journalism, crime writing, and science fiction, the more than 300 volumes published by Library of America are widely recognized as America’s literary canon.

Browse our books Subscribe

NON-PROFIT

With contributions from donors, Library of America preserves and celebrates a vital part of our cultural heritage for generations to come.

Support our mission

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays & Lectures

Related Books

Get 10% off your first Library of America purchase.