Ralph Waldo Emerson Biography

This Biography consists of approximately 22 pages of information about the life of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Biography

This Biography consists of approximately 22 pages of information about the life of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
This section contains 6,460 words
(approx. 22 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Ralph Waldo Emerson Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Ralph Waldo Emerson

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 first developed a distinctively national literature worthy of comparison to that of the mother country. Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson were all deeply indebted to Emerson and helped to transmit his legacy. As the leading expositor of New England Transcendentalism, Emerson also had a decisive impact upon the course of American philosophy and religion. Any serious discussion of such "American" traits as individualism, optimism, pietism, glorification of nature and wilderness, egalitarianism, utopianism, and literary experimentalism must take account of Emerson 's pronouncements on these subjects. Because he was an eclectic and unsystematic thinker, Emerson has often been criticized as a superficial popularizer...

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This section contains 6,460 words
(approx. 22 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Ralph Waldo Emerson Biography
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Ralph Waldo Emerson from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.