SOURCE: “The Making of an American Prophet: Emerson, His Audiences, and the Rise of the Culture Industry in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Lawrence Buell, Prentice Hall, 1993, pp. 77-100.

In the following essay, originally published in 1987, Cayton offers an assessment of Emerson's cultural impact in the context of contemporary media.

… The case of Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the most celebrated of American intellectuals, can shed light on the ways in which meanings are made in intellectual discourse and what those meanings have to do with those people not filling the role of intellectual within the culture. Historians have never known precisely how to categorize Emerson. Perry Miller saw him as the heir and transformer of Edwardsian Puritanism. F. O. Matthiessen saw in him the founder of American literary romanticism and termed his the “age of Emerson.” Others (notably Stanley...