Carlos Baker Critical Essay | Critical Review by W. Clark Gilpin

Critical Review by W. Clark Gilpin

SOURCE: Gilpin, W. Clark. Review of Emerson Among the Eccentrics, by Carlos Baker. Christian Century 113, no. 28 (9 October 1996): 943.

In the following review, Gilpin offers a favorable assessment of Baker's biography of Emerson.

Carlos Baker, who had a long and distinguished career as a literary critic at Princeton University, is perhaps best known for his magisterial 1969 biography of Ernest Hemingway. But for more than a decade thereafter Baker focused on Ralph Waldo Emerson, and this distinctive biography is the welcome result. Virtually complete at the time of Baker's death in 1987, Emerson Among the Eccentrics details Emerson's life in Concord, his encounters on lecture tours, and the incidents of his remarkable friendships.

It is those friendships that give this book its distinctive theme and vantage point. Emerson himself was fascinated with biography, punctuating his journals with acute characterizations of both acquaintances and public figures. Baker continues...
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