The standard biographies are The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, by Ralph L. Rusk, (New York: Scribner’s 1949), and Waldo Emerson, by Gay Wilson Allen (New York: Viking, 1981). Also valuable are Representative Man, by Joel Porte (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), and John McAleer’s Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter (Boston: Little Brown, 1984). Among earlier biographies, those by James Eliot Cabot, Moncure Conway, and George Woodbury are particularly valuable.

Criticism:

For a quick overview of how Emerson has been perceived, see Critical Essays on Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Burkholder and Myerson (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983). The beginning of modern criticism on Emerson is F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941). Since that time, significant criticism includes: Vivian Hopkins, Spires of Form: A Study of Emerson’s Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1951); Sherman Paul, Emerson’s Angle of Vision (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1952); Stephen E. Whicher, Freedom and Fate (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953); Jonathan Bishop, Emerson on the Soul (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1964); Lawrence Buell, Literary Transcendentalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973); Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975); Harold Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), and Poetry and Repression (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); Robert D. Richardson Jr., Myth and Literature in the American Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978); Eric Cheyfitz, The Transparent; Sexual Politics in the Language of Emerson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); Philip F. Gura, The Wisdom of Words (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1981); Jerome Loving, Emerson, Whitman and the American Muse (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); Barbara Packer, Emerson’s Fall (New York: Continuum, 1982); David Robinson, Apostle of Culture; Emerson as Preacher and Lecturer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982); Leonard Neufeldt, The House of Emerson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982); Phyllis Cole, “The Advantage of Loneliness; Mary Moody Emerson’s Almanacks, 1802–1855,” in Emerson: Prospect and Retrospect (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1982); Julie K. Ellison, Emerson’s Romantic Style (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Gertrude Reif Hughes, Emerson’s Demanding Optimism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984); George Kateb, “Thinking About Human Extinction,” in Raritan, Fall 1986 and Winter 1987; Geoffrey Steele, The Representation of the Self in the American Renaissance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Richard Poirier, The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections (New York: Random House, 1987); Donald E. Pease, Visionary Compacts (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Evelyn Barish, Emerson: The Roots of Prophecy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Mary K. Cayton, Emerson’s Emergence (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).

Note on the Text

NOTE ON THE TEXT