The complete online text of Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

No one has a better claim than Ralph Waldo Emerson to being the central figure in the whole history of American literature. All artists distill influences from the past to become, themselves, influences on the future, but in Emerson's case the affiliatio...

Ralph Waldo Emerson was not a practicing literary critic in the sense that Edgar Allan Poe and William Dean Howells were, and he was not a theorist as Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling or Friedrich Ernst Schleiermacher were. Yet he wa...

Ralph Waldo Emerson is perhaps the single most influential figure in American literary history More than any other author of his day, he was responsible for shaping the literary style and vision of the American romantic period, the era when the United St...