Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

About the book

This selection presents Emerson as a writer about the conduct of an independent life, moving between intellectual freedom and everyday relations. The American Scholar challenges inherited habits of learning, while Self-Reliance urges readers to examine the authority they grant to custom and public approval. Friendship, manners, gifts, prudence, and heroism bring those large claims into social experience, where independence must coexist with obligations to others. Essays on nature and Shakespeare extend the inquiry toward perception and creative power. Edna H. L. Turpin supplies introductory material and notes for readers approaching Emerson's compressed, allusive prose. The result is an anthology across his writing, rather than a single original essay collection, with ample room to notice tensions between its confident declarations.

• Independent judgment
• Friendship and society
• Creative perception

Why read it

A varied introduction to Emerson that places the famous declarations beside his less solitary subjects.

English selection edited with introduction and notes by Edna H. L. Turpin, 1907