Emerson

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by Lawrence Buell

Harvard University Press

Due/Published September 2004, 416 pages, paper

ISBN 0674016270

New in paper (F04)

 "An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man," Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote--and in this book, Buell looks at the long shadow Emerson himself has cast, and at his role and significance as a truly American institution. On the occasion of Emerson's 200th birthday, Lawrence Buell revisits the life of the nation's first public intellectual and discovers how he became a "representative man."

Born into the age of inspired amateurism that emerged from the ruins of pre-revolutionary political, religious, and cultural institutions, Emerson took up the challenge of thinking about the role of the United States alone and in the world. Buell conveys both the style and substance of Emerson's accomplishment--in his conception of America as the transplantation of Englishness into the new world, and in his prodigious work as writer, religious thinker, and philosopher. Here we see clearly the paradoxical key to his success, the fierce insistence on independence that acted so magnetically upon all around him. At a time when Americans and non-Americans alike are struggling to understand what this country is, and what it is about, Buell suggests that Emerson gives us an answer in the figure of this representative American, an American for all, and for all times.