Status
Available
Genres
Publication
Berkeley, Calif. [u.a.] : Univ. of California Press, 1995
Description
This comprehensive portrait of Emerson draws from newly available material, including correspondence between the Emerson brothers.
User reviews
LibraryThing member Your_local_coyote
Here is from a recent review in The Guardian
John Banville
The best book I have read this year is Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert D Richardson Jr (University of California Press), a superb biography of the great American philosopher and prose-poet. Richardson's scholarship is exhaustive, he
John Banville
The best book I have read this year is Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert D Richardson Jr (University of California Press), a superb biography of the great American philosopher and prose-poet. Richardson's scholarship is exhaustive, he
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writes a straightforward yet mesmeric prose, and his gift for tracing the development of Emerson's mind through apposite quotation is uncanny. This is, simply, a great book. Show Less
LibraryThing member chiefyg
Fantastic! Inspiring overall if a bit slow in places. For an Emerson fanatic, this is a must-read, imo...
LibraryThing member Tom.Wilson
Richardson has read just about everything that Emerson read, so he's able to contextualize periods and ideas in the author's life and writings in a very helpful manner. He writes superbly, and he really gets Emerson's impulse to praise and celebrate. Emerson distributed his literary largess in
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journal entries, letters, lectures and elsewhere, so by reading biography you get in effect a lovely 'selected Emerson'. And Emerson at his best is, in my view, as good as imaginative prose ever gets in the English language. Having this book in my life for a few weeks was galvanizing, and a reminder of why I am passionate about literature. Show Less
Subjects
Awards
National Book Critics Circle Award (Finalist — Biography/Autobiography — 1995)
Francis Parkman Prize (1996)