These pages present a young suitor, a
grief-stricken widower, an affectionate
father, and a man with an abiding genius
for friendship. The great spokesman for
individualism and self-reliance turns out
to have been a good neighbor, an activist
citizen, a loyal brother. Here is an Emerson
who knew how to laugh, who was
self-doubting as well as self-reliant, and who
became the greatest intellectual of his age.

Richardson, has, as much as possible, let
Emerson speak for himself through his
published works, his many journals and
notebooks, his letters, his reported
conversations. This is not merely a study
of Emerson’s writing and his influence
on others, it is Emerson’s life as he experienced
it. We see the failed minister, the struggling
writer, the political reformer, the poetic
liberator.

The Emerson of this book not only influenced
Thoreau, Fuller, Whitman, Dickinson, and
Frost, he also inspired Nietzsche, William
James, Baudelaire, Marcel Proust,
Virginia Woolf, and Jorge Luis Borges.
Emerson’s timeliness persists, owing to
his respect for nature, his insistence that
literature and science are not separate
cultures, and his emphasis on the
worth of every individual.

Richardson gives careful attention to the
enormous range of Emerson’s readings –
from Persian poets to George Sand – and
to his many friendships and personal
encounters – from Mary Moody Emerson
to the Cherokee chiefs in Boston – evoking
both the man and the times in which he
lived. Through this book, Emerson
unquenchable vitality reaches across the
decades, and his hold on us endures.