At last, a comprehensive collection of Ralph Waldo Emerson's writtings available in a paperback student edition. This Norton Critical Edition includes a generous selection from Emerson's sermons, lectures, essays, addresses, and poems as well as essential excerpts from his journals, notebooks, and correspondence. In addition, this is the first Emerson anthology to include a substantial portion of Emerson's contributions to Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. "Contexts" sheds light on the cultural climate within which American Transcendentalism developed, reproducing writings by Madame de Staël, William Wordsworth, Frederic Henry Hedge, and Sampson Reed. Emerson's contemporary reception and a variety of responses to him are represented both by caricatures and by literary impressions from, among others, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Walt Whitman, Margaret Fuller, George Santayana, D. H Lawrence, and A. R. Ammons. Fourteen critical interpretations, selected from the many hundreds published in the twentieth century, also appear. O. A. Firkins, Stephen E. Whicher, Perry Miller, Joel Porte, Hyatt H. Waggoner, Julie Ellison, Michael T. Gilmore, Barbara Packer, Stanley Cavell, Cornel West, Len Gougeon, Richard Poirier, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., and Saundra Morris offer their assessments of this major American thinker and writer. A Chronology, Selected Bibliography, and Index to the poems are also provided.
