Representative Men

Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered these seven lectures in the late 1840s and published them in 1850, offering his own answer to Carlyle’s cult of the hero. Rather than worship great men, Emerson treats them as representatives of human possibility, each embodying a quality the rest of us carry in smaller measure. He takes up Plato the philosopher, Swedenborg the mystic, Montaigne the skeptic, Shakespeare the poet, Napoleon the man of the world, and Goethe the writer, weighing what each achieved and where each fell short. The essays distill his conviction that genius belongs to everyone, and that we read a great life mainly to find ourselves reflected in it. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.