Self-Reliance and Other Essays

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CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016 M08 21 - 188 pages
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, 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 he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays & correspondence and more than 1,500 public lectures and speeches across the United States. Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays & correspondence and speeches encompasses a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability of humankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures and speeches first, then revised them for print. His most famous collections of essays are contained in this volume and they were originally published in the 1840's 1841. In addition to twelve classic Ralph Waldo Emerson essays, this anthology volume also inludes the core of Ralph Waldo Emerson's thinking. This anthology volume includes Waldo's well known essay; Self-Reliance. Self Reliance 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 their own instincts and ideas. Whether derived from an Emerson speech, lecture, essay, or correspondence, this edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson's work is an invaluable literature compilation.

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About the author (2016)

Known primarily as the leader of the philosophical movement transcendentalism, which stresses the ties of humans to nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson, American poet and essayist, was born in Boston in 1803. From a long line of religious leaders, Emerson became the minister of the Second Church (Unitarian) in 1829. He left the church in 1832 because of profound differences in interpretation and doubts about church doctrine. He visited England and met with British writers and philosophers. It was during this first excursion abroad that Emerson formulated his ideas for Self-Reliance. He returned to the United States in 1833 and settled in Concord, Massachusetts. He began lecturing in Boston. His first book, Nature (1836), published anonymously, detailed his belief and has come to be regarded as his most significant original work on the essence of his philosophy of transcendentalism. The first volume of Essays (1841) contained some of Emerson's most popular works, including the renowned Self-Reliance. Emerson befriended and influenced a number of American authors including Henry David Thoreau. It was Emerson's practice of keeping a journal that inspired Thoreau to do the same and set the stage for Thoreau's experiences at Walden Pond. Emerson married twice (his first wife Ellen died in 1831 of tuberculosis) and had four children (two boys and two girls) with his second wife, Lydia. His first born, Waldo, died at age six. Emerson died in Concord on April 27, 1882 at the age of 78 due to pneumonia and is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts.

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