Description: When the first volume of The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson was published by Columbia University Press in 1939, Odell Shepard hailed it on the front page of the New York Times Book Review as "a performance boldly planned and triumphantly achieved, of which every American has reason to be proud". Reflecting on how Emerson struggled to be spontaneous in his formal writings, Shepard points out that readers "will be glad to know that he often made himself amends with a racing, garrulous, and somewhat slovenly pen". Published in ten volumes over fifty years, the compendium of more than 4,500 letters from this towering figure in American life has proven a boundless resource for scholars.

Virtually no writer has so influenced American thought as Ralph Waldo Emerson. The heart of Transcendentalism, Emerson today is known chiefly through the essays, poems, sermons, and lectures that are home to some of America's best-loved aphorisms. Now the renowned Emerson scholar Joel Myerson has distilled the essential core of this great thinker's vast letter-writing endeavor into one volume, presenting a collection of 350 pieces of his most enduring correspondence written between 1813 and 1880. Emerson's letters shine with the same insight that draws knowledge-seekers to his essays, poems, sermons, and lectures more than a century after his death.

With The Selected Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, readers will encounter Emerson at his most guarded and his most vulnerable, writing to other Transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller, to his wife and to his brothers, to such friends as Longfellow and Whitman. From elegies of love to expressions of condolence, from letters of supportfor Thoreau and Whitman to evaluations of friends' writings, this singular collection presents an Emerson deeply connected to the world around him. What emerges from our stereotype of the cerebral philosopher is an Emerson socially, emotionally, and politically engaged with the vital issues of his day, as well as the intimate concerns of everyday life.

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