Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson is the 1885 biography of the Concord philosopher by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809-1894), written for the American Men of Letters series. Holmes and Emerson were Harvard contemporaries and fellow members of the Saturday Club, the famous Boston dining circle that also included Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Agassiz, and Holmes writes from four decades of personal acquaintance. The biography covers Emerson’s ministry and resignation, the Transcendentalist years, the essays and poems, the lecturing career, and the long Concord old age, with Holmes’s own shrewd assessments of Emerson’s thought from the standpoint of a scientific rationalist who admired the man while keeping a sceptic’s distance from Transcendentalism. The book remains a valuable first-hand portrait by one major American writer of another. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.