Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most important figures in the history of American thought, religion, and literature. The vitality of his writings and the unsettling power of his example continue to influence us more than a hundred years after his death. Now Robert D. Richardson Jr. brings to life an Emerson very different from the old stereotype of the passionless Sage of Concord. Drawing on a vast amount of new material, including correspondence among the Emerson brothers, Richardson gives us a rewarding intellectual biography that is also a portrait of the whole man.

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 adventurer 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 is persistent and striking: his insistence that literature and science are not separate cultures, his emphasis on the worth of every individual, his respect for nature.

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. Throughout this book, Emerson's unquenchable vitality reaches across the decades, and his hold on us endures.

Robert D. Richardson Jr., Adjunct Professor of Letters at Wesleyan University, is also the author of Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (California, 1986), which won the Melcher Prize in 1987. Barry Moser is one of the foremost wood engravers and book illustrators in America.

“[A]n electrifying work . . . a phenomenal piece of portraiture”—New York Newsday

"One of those exciting books that flash bolts of lightning across an entire intellectual era and up and down modern history. . . . A book you can lean on, return to, live with. It . . . is above all a book of impassioned and humane scholarship. It will send you on or back to a writer who will make you think about, well, almost everything."—Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World

"The mystery of Emerson's development is skillfully probed by Robert D. Richardson Jr. in his new biography of the Sage of Concord. . . . A worthy addition to the library of books on one of America's foremost thinkers."—David S. Reynolds, New York Times Book Review

"Nowhere else do we have so full an account of of Emerson's intellectual life."—John McAleer, Chicago Tribune

"A masterful work, this biography will attract the attention of scholars and serious general readers for decades."—Booklist

"A captivating account of the originality, creativity, and genius of the American Coleridge."—Library Journal

“Richardson’s splendid [book] is the first biography that locates the source of Emerson’s volcanic power in his emotional depth and searing intellectual intensity. . . . The result is a suggestive and sympathetic work that gets to the heart of the man who felt that ‘life is an ecstasy.’”—Edward Hirsch, The New Yorker

“Richardson has performed an immensely valuable task of scholarship. The Emerson who emerges in these pages is alive to his fingertips, blazing with the God within, the divine spark that kindles the world to life in consciousness each day.”—Jay Parini, Times Literary Supplement

"Richardson's rich and extensive book on Ralph Waldo Emerson is a guide to the fire that burned always at the center of Emerson's life. . . . To read this book is to be touched on the shoulder by a thousand years of poetry and thought. . . . For those who would understand Emerson, it is unforgettable; it is essential."—Mary Oliver, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

"Emerson himself would surely have applauded Robert Richardson's monumental study, which treats the sage's thought not as a set of coldly reasoned propositions but as the continually shifting outcome of a struggle to surmount crisis and tragedy. In the process, Richardson has fashioned our most credible portrait of a vulnerable, driven, fully human Emerson."—Frederick Crews, author of The Sins of the Father

"The best biography I have read in years. Mr. Richardson is just the splendid writer Emerson has long deserved, and he makes the story great-hearted, inclusive, intellectual, and inspiring. I was enthralled."—Edward Hoagland

"A superb work . . . that will quickly come to be regarded as the definitive biography of Emerson. . . . Richardson's greatest achievement is to restore for us the emotional and passionate element of Emerson's life and personality, and to make us understand how significant an element that was. . . . He brings a very complex and interesting man—not just a thinker—to life."—David M. Robinson, author of Emerson and the Conduct of Life

"Scholars and general readers alike will return to this comprehensive and painstaking study for a long time to come."—Joel Porte, editor of Emerson's Essays

"The most readable biography of Emerson ever written and also one of the best from a scholarly standpoint."—Lawrence Buell, Harvard University

"In this magnificent study Emerson stands before us not only as the embodiment of his 'American Scholar' but also as a human mind. Richardson's Emerson is one whom we want to reread, but, more important, also whom we want to know as a friend and mentor."—Philip F. Gura

Francis Parkman Prize for literary distinction in the writing of history and biography, The Society of American Historians
Melcher Book Award, The Unitarian Universalist Association
Certificate of Merit for a Distinguished Literary Biography Published in 1995, The Gale Research Company
St. Nicholas Society Literary Award, The St. Nicholas Society of New York