Through his writing and his own personal philosophy, Ralph Waldo Emerson unburdened his young country of Europe's
traditional sense of history and showed Americans how to be creators of their own circumstances. His mandate, which
called for harmony with, rather than domestication of, nature, and for a reliance on individual integrity, rather
than on materialistic institutions, is echoed in many of the great American philosophical and literary works of
his time and ours, and has given an impetus to modern political and social activism.
Larzer Ziff's introduction to this collection of fifteen of Emerson's most significant writings provides the important
backdrop to the society in which Emerson lived during his formative years.
Table of Contents
Nature 1836
The American Scholar 1837
An Address Delivered Before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge 1838
Man the Reformer 1841
History (Essays, First Series) 1841
Self-Reliance (Essays, First Series) 1841
The Over-Soul (Essays, First Series) 1841
Circles (Essays, First Series) 1841
The Transcendentalist 1842
The Poet (Essays, Second Series) 1844
Experience (Essays, Second Series) 1844
Montaigne; Or, the Skeptic (Representative Men) 1850
Napoleon; Or, the Man of the World (Representative Men) 1850
Fate (The Conduct of Life) 1860
Thoreau 1862
