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...

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...

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...

Ralph Waldo Emerson is perhaps the most influential and pivotal figure in American literary history. As a writer he was a major nineteenth-century craftsman of American cultural identity. Emerson brought about an awareness of what it could mean to be...

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 States...

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most renowned New England Transcendentalist, stirred Victorian American audiences with his message of self-reliance, philosophical idealism, and forward-looking optimism. Emerson's one travel work and the only book-length...

Ralph Waldo Emerson's contribution to magazine journalism consists of his work in connection with the Dial, the voice of early American transcendentalism. A major force in the creation of the journal, from 1840 to 1842 Emerson served primarily as...

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was the most thought-provoking American cultural leader of the mid-19th century. In his unorthodox ideas and actions he represented a minority of Americans, but by the end of his life he was considered a sage. Though...