Kenneth Sacks is an American historian and classicist, noted for his work on Ralph Waldo Emerson. [1] [2] Currently he serves as Professor of History and Classics at Brown University, where he was previously Dean of the College. [3]
A graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, Sacks received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied under Erich S. Gruen and Raphael Sealey. He then taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison until 1995, when he joined Brown as Dean of the College. [4] The author of two books on Greek historians, Polybius on the Writing of History (1981) and Diodorus Siculus and the First Century (1990, a Choice "Outstanding Academic Book of 1991), he is most recently the author of Understanding Emerson: "The American Scholar" and His Struggle for Self-Reliance (2003). [5] [6] [7] Sacks is additionally the editor of the volume on Emerson for the Cambridge Texts in History of Political Thought. [8]
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and his ideology was disseminated through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.
Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the New England region of the United States. A core belief is in the inherent goodness of people and nature, and while society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. Transcendentalists saw divine experience inherent in the everyday, rather than believing in a distant heaven. Transcendentalists saw physical and spiritual phenomena as part of dynamic processes rather than discrete entities.
Malcolm Cowley was an American writer, editor, historian, poet, and literary critic. His best known works include his first book of poetry, Blue Juniata (1929), his lyrical memoir, Exile's Return, as a chronicler and fellow traveller of the Lost Generation, and as an influential editor and talent scout at Viking Press.
"Self-Reliance" is an 1841 essay written by American transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. It contains the most thorough statement of one of Emerson's recurrent themes: the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow his own instincts and ideas. It is the source of one of Emerson's most famous quotations:
"The American Scholar" was a speech given by Ralph Waldo Emerson on August 31, 1837, to the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College at the First Parish in Cambridge in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was invited to speak in recognition of his groundbreaking work Nature, published a year earlier, in which he established a new way for America's fledgling society to regard the world. Sixty years after declaring independence, American culture was still heavily influenced by Europe, and Emerson, for possibly the first time in the country's history, provided a visionary philosophical framework for escaping "from under its iron lids" and building a new, distinctly American cultural identity.
Frederic Henry Hedge was a New England Unitarian minister and Transcendentalist. He was a founder of the Transcendental Club, originally called Hedge's Club, and active in the development of Transcendentalism. He was one of the foremost scholars of German literature in the United States.
The Old Manse is a historic manse in Concord, Massachusetts, United States, notable for its literary associations. It is open to the public as a nonprofit museum owned and operated by the Trustees of Reservations. The house is located on Monument Street, with the Concord River just behind it. The property neighbors the North Bridge, a part of Minute Man National Historical Park.
Bliss Perry, was an American literary critic, writer, editor, and teacher.
Lawrence Ingalls Buell is Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Harvard University, specialist on antebellum American literature and a pioneer of Ecocriticism. He is the 2007 recipient of the Jay Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Literary studies, the "highest professional award that the American Literature Section of the MLA can give." He won the 2003 Warren-Brooks Award for outstanding literary criticism for his 2003 book on Ralph Waldo Emerson. His Writing for an Endangered World won the 2001 John G. Cawelti Award for the best book in the field of American Culture Studies. He retired from Harvard in 2011.
Christopher Benfey is an American literary critic and Emily Dickinson scholar. He is the Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College.
Joel Miles Porte was an American literary scholar, who was an internationally renowned authority on the life and work of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The Ralph Waldo Emerson House is a house museum located at 18 Cambridge Turnpike, Concord, Massachusetts, and a National Historic Landmark for its associations with American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. He and his family named the home Bush. The museum is open mid-April to mid-October; an admission fee is charged.
Ronald A. Bosco is the Distinguished Professor of English and American Literature at the University at Albany, State University of New York, is currently President of the Association for Documentary Editing and General Editor of The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson published by Harvard University Press. Bosco is one of the country's leading experts on the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and on American Puritan homiletics and poetics.
Robert Dale Richardson III was an American historian and biographer.
Roger Sedarat is an Iranian-American poet, scholar, and literary translator.
The transparent eyeball is a philosophical metaphor originated by American transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his essay Nature, the metaphor stands for a view of life that is absorbent rather than reflective, and therefore takes in all that nature has to offer without bias or contradiction. Emerson intends that the individual become one with nature, and the manner of the transparent eyeball is an approach to achieving it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Letter to Martin Van Buren" (1838) was written in response to the government's efforts to remove the Cherokee people from their native lands. In his letter to then-president Martin Van Buren, Emerson strongly represents that he, as well as other citizens of the American nation, feel that the American government is committing a serious evil crime in proceeding with the removal of the Cherokee. He stresses the efforts of the aboriginal population by stating that "Even in our distant state, some good rumor of their worth and civility has arrived. We have learned with joy their improvement in social arts. We have read their newspapers. We have seen some of them in our schools and colleges. In common with the great body of the American people we have witnessed with sympathy the painful labors of these red men to redeem their own race from the doom of eternal inferiority, and to borrow and domesticate in the tribe, the arts and customs of the Caucasian race." ." In the conclusion of the letter, Emerson questions the morality of a government that could put "so vast an outrage upon the Cherokee nation, and upon human nature ."
Michael Joseph Colacurcio is a distinguished professor of English at UCLA. He specializes in American literature and literary history.
"Boston Hymn" is a poem by the American essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson composed the poem in late 1862 and read it publicly in Boston Music Hall on January 1, 1863. It commemorates the Emancipation Proclamation issued earlier that day by President Abraham Lincoln, tying it and the broader campaign for the abolition of slavery to the Puritan notion of sacred destiny for America.
The Carlyle–Emerson correspondence is a series of letters written between Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) from 14 May 1834 to 20 June 1873. It has been called "one of the classic documents of nineteenth-century literature."