Author: Ralph Waldo EmersonPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 632
Book Description
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks: 1860-1866
Author: Ralph Waldo EmersonThe Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Author: Ralph Waldo EmersonPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674484788
Category : Authors, American
Languages : en
Pages : 628
Book Description
In the eight regular journals and three miscellaneous notebooks of this volume is the record of fusions. This period of his life closes, as it opened, with 'acquiescence and optimism.'
The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson: 1860-1866
Author: Ralph Waldo EmersonJournals and Miscellaneous Notebooks: 1866-1882
Author: Ralph Waldo EmersonPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Authors, American
Languages : en
Pages : 640
Book Description
In the eight regular journals and three miscellaneous notebooks of this volume is the record of fusions. This period of his life closes, as it opened, with 'acquiescence and optimism.'
Hawthorne
Author: Brenda WineapplePublisher: Random House
ISBN: 0307808661
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 530
Book Description
Handsome, reserved, almost frighteningly aloof until he was approached, then playful, cordial, Nathaniel Hawthorne was as mercurial and double-edged as his writing. “Deep as Dante,” Herman Melville said. Hawthorne himself declared that he was not “one of those supremely hospitable people who serve up their own hearts, delicately fried, with brain sauce, as a tidbit” for the public. Yet those who knew him best often took the opposite position. “He always puts himself in his books,” said his sister-in-law Mary Mann, “he cannot help it.” His life, like his work, was extraordinary, a play of light and shadow. In this major new biography of Hawthorne, the first in more than a decade, Brenda Wineapple, acclaimed biographer of Janet Flanner and Gertrude and Leo Stein (“Luminous”–Richard Howard), brings him brilliantly alive: an exquisite writer who shoveled dung in an attempt to found a new utopia at Brook Farm and then excoriated the community (or his attraction to it) in caustic satire; the confidant of Franklin Pierce, fourteenth president of the United States and arguably one of its worst; friend to Emerson and Thoreau and Melville who, unlike them, made fun of Abraham Lincoln and who, also unlike them, wrote compellingly of women, deeply identifying with them–he was the first major American writer to create erotic female characters. Those vibrant, independent women continue to haunt the imagination, although Hawthorne often punishes, humiliates, or kills them, as if exorcising that which enthralls. Here is the man rooted in Salem, Massachusetts, of an old pre-Revolutionary family, reared partly in the wilds of western Maine, then schooled along with Longfellow at Bowdoin College. Here are his idyllic marriage to the youngest and prettiest of the Peabody sisters and his longtime friendships, including with Margaret Fuller, the notorious feminist writer and intellectual. Here too is Hawthorne at the end of his days, revered as a genius, but considered as well to be an embarrassing puzzle by the Boston intelligentsia, isolated by fiercely held political loyalties that placed him against the Civil War and the currents of his time. Brenda Wineapple navigates the high tides and chill undercurrents of Hawthorne’s fascinating life and work with clarity, nuance, and insight. The novels and tales, the incidental writings, travel notes and children’s books, letters and diaries reverberate in this biography, which both charts and protects the dark unknowable core that is quintessentially Hawthorne. In him, the quest of his generation for an authentically American voice bears disquieting fruit.
Six Encounters with Lincoln
Author: Elizabeth Brown PryorPublisher: Penguin
ISBN: 014311123X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 498
Book Description
Winner of the Barondess/Lincoln Award from The Civil War Round Table of New York “Fascinating reading. . .this book eerily reflects some of today’s key issues.” – The New York Times Book Review From an award-winning historian, an engrossing look at how Abraham Lincoln grappled with the challenges of leadership in an unruly democracy An awkward first meeting with U.S. Army officers, on the eve of the Civil War. A conversation on the White House portico with a young cavalry sergeant who was a fiercely dedicated abolitionist. A tense exchange on a navy ship with a Confederate editor and businessman. In this eye-opening book, Elizabeth Brown Pryor examines six intriguing, mostly unknown encounters that Abraham Lincoln had with his constituents. Taken together, they reveal his character and opinions in unexpected ways, illustrating his difficulties in managing a republic and creating a presidency. Pryor probes both the political demons that Lincoln battled in his ambitious exercise of power and the demons that arose from the very nature of democracy itself: the clamorous diversity of the populace, with its outspoken demands. She explores the trouble Lincoln sometimes had in communicating and in juggling the multiple concerns that make up being a political leader; how conflicted he was over the problem of emancipation; and the misperceptions Lincoln and the South held about each other. Pryor also provides a fascinating discussion of Lincoln’s fondness for storytelling and how he used his skills as a raconteur to enhance both his personal and political power. Based on scrupulous research that draws on hundreds of eyewitness letters, diaries, and newspaper excerpts, Six Encounters with Lincoln offers a fresh portrait of Lincoln as the beleaguered politician who was not especially popular with the people he needed to govern with, and who had to deal with the many critics, naysayers, and dilemmas he faced without always knowing the right answer. What it shows most clearly is that greatness was not simply laid on Lincoln’s shoulders like a mantle, but was won in fits and starts.
Niagaras of Ink
Author: Jamie M. CarrPublisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438479999
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 206
Book Description
Niagara Falls is a place where lands are contested, industry debated, freedom harbored, the spirit uplifted, and fame won. It overflows with stories. Since before digital technologies made visual reproduction easier and more abundant than ever, writers composed Niagara Falls as symbolically meaningful. But in the face of four centuries of writing on this natural wonder, how does one make these stories new? Niagaras of Ink collects anecdotes of famous writers' experiences—previously untold tales, unique takes on well-known visits, and materials just too good to exclude—with an anthology of some of the most engaging Anglo-American writing on the Falls from the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. This collection invites readers to re-see Niagara through these lenses.
The Letters of Margaret Fuller
Author: Margaret FullerPublisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501725203
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 329
Book Description
From 1844 to 1847 Margaret Fuller served as review editor for Horace Greeley's New-York Herald Tribune—and herself reviewed books by Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville among others—and published Papers on Literature and Art, a volume of her own essays. She became known as something of a radical in literary circles, allying herself with George Sand, Emerson, and Goethe, and with the Young America poets, Evert A. Duyckinck, Cornelius Mathews, and William Gilmore Simms. In August 1846 Fuller left for Europe with her friends Marcus and Rebecca Spring. Her letters describe her meetings there with Thomas Carlyle, George Sand, Lamennais, and the aging Wordsworth, and with such political figures as the exiles Giuseppe Mazzini and Adam Mickiewicz. Often the letters expand upon topics addressed in her public writing. Her life in these years, however, is dominated by her love for the German businessman James Nathan. The nearly fifty letters she wrote to him in 1845 and 1846 show her startling willingness to take a subservient role and her longing for emotional acceptance. Dreams of a lasting relationship with Nathan end in Europe with his betrothal to another woman, but by the spring of 1847 she had recovered from her deep disappointment and gone on to achieve great personal growth, both in her consciousness of herself as a woman and in political awareness. By the time this volume comes to a close she has met Giovanni Ossoli, a man who shares her ideals and offers her emotional security.
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume I: 1819-1822
Author: Ralph Waldo EmersonPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674484504
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 502
Book Description
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the man and thinker, will be fully revealed for the first time in this new edition of his journals and notebooks. The old image of the ideal nineteenth-century gentleman, created by editorial omissions of his spontaneous thoughts, is replaced by the picture of Emerson as he really was. His frank and often bitter criticisms of men and society, his "nihilizing," his anguish at the death of his first wife, his bleak struggles with depression and loneliness, his sardonic views of woman, his earthy humor, his ideas of the Negro, of religion, of God--these and other expressions of his private thought and feeling, formerly deleted or subdued, are here restored. Restored also is the full evidence needed for studies of his habits of composition, the development of his style, and the sources of his ideas. Cancelled passages are reproduced, misreadings are corrected, and hitherto unpublished manuscripts are now printed. The text comes as close to a literal transcription as is feasible. A full apparatus of annotation, identification of quotations, and textual notes is supplied. Reproduced in this volume are twelve facsimile manuscript pages, many with Emerson's marginal drawings. The first volume includes some of the "Wide Worlds," journals begun while Emerson was at Harvard, and four contemporary notebooks, mostly unpublished. In these storehouses of quotation, juvenile verse, themes, and stories are the first versions of Emerson's "Valedictory Poem," Bowdoin Prize Essays, and first published work. Together they give a faithful picture of Emerson's apprenticeship as an artist and reveal the extent of his hidden and frustrated ambition--to become a writer.
Apropos of Something
Author: Elisa TamarkinPublisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022645312X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 445
Book Description
"Before 1800 nothing was irrelevant. So argues Elisa Tamarkin's sweeping cultural history of a key shift in consciousness: the arrival, around 1800, of "relevance" as the means to grasp how something previously disregarded becomes important and interesting. At a time when so much makes claims to attention every day, how does one decide what is most valuable right now? This is not only a contemporary problem. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, the question for the nineteenth century was how, in the immensity and "succession" of objects, anything becomes a proper object of experience. How that question was finally defined as one of relevance is the story of Apropos of Nothing. Relevance, Tamarkin shows, was primarily an Anglo-American concept. It engaged major intellectual figures, centrally the pragmatists-William James, Alain Locke, and John Dewey-and before them thinkers including Emerson and Alfred North Whitehead. Most of all, relevance was a problem for the worlds of art, literature, education, and criticism. These were fascinated by how old, boring, distant, or unfamiliar things get taken in; how they are admitted as meaningful; how they come home to us like the ludicrous raven comes to Edgar Allan Poe's student in the middle of the night in some obscure connection with himself. Many nineteenth-century American artists saw their paintings as pragmatic works that make relevance-that suggest versions of events that feel apropos of our world the moment we see them. (Tamarkin's book is richly illustrated, in color, with works by Winslow Homer, Abbott Handerson Thayer, Edgar Degas, and others.) Relevance remains a conundrum, especially for the humanities. It obliges us to say why we admit Poe's poem-or, say, a line of Emerson's-is interesting enough to study it, to dedicate ourselves to understanding it, to affirming that this effort is, in Emerson's words, "relevant to me and mine, to nature, and the hour that now passes.""--