RALPH WALDO EMERSON was born in Boston on May 25, 1803, the descendant of a long line of ministers. After his father’s death, his mother moved her five sons to Concord to raise them with the help of Emerson’s aunt, Mary Moody Emerson. Entering Harvard at fourteen, Emerson showed little promise of becoming America’s first great thinker and graduated in the bottom half of his class. Tubercular, restless, and already questioning the religion of his fathers, Emerson nevertheless entered the ministry in 1826 and became an associate pastor at Boston’s Second Church (Unitarian). But in 1831, unable in good conscience to administer the Eucharist and following the death of his young wife, Ellen Tucker, he resigned from his position. His 1832 trip to Europe further influenced his ideas of the Over-Soul, and he began a lifelong friendship with Thomas Carlyle. Upon his return he settled in Concord and married Lydia Jackson. His first book, Nature (1836), summarized his major ideas and put him at the center of the New England Trancendentalists, who included Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and Henry Thoreau. With the publication of Essays, First Series (1841) and Essays, Second Series (1844), his position as their leading figure was established. From 1842 to 1844 he edited The Dial magazine. In 1847 he published Poems and returned to Europe, where he delivered the lectures that appeared in Representative Men (1850). A prolific author, his complete works fill forty volumes. He lived in Concord, Massachusetts, revered as a thinker and writer, until his death in 1882.

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RALPH WALDO EMERSON: SELECTED ESSAYS, LECTURES, AND POEMS

A Bantam Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY

A Bantam Classic Book / October 1990

Bantam Classic reissue edition / January 2007

Published by Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

This edition copyright © 1990 by Bantam Books

Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-0-553-90332-4

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