Emerson: The Mind on Fire

by Robert D. Richardson Jr., Barry Moser

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 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.

Genres: Biography, Philosophy, Nonfiction, History, Biography Memoir, Religion, American History

684 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

The son of a Unitarian minister, Robert Dale Richardson III grew up in Massachusetts and earned his bachelor's and doctorate degrees in English at Harvard University. Richardson taught at a number of colleges, including the University of Denver and Wesleyan University.

Reviews

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very difficult book to review because there’s so much to talk about; I’m going to condense it and just say: read it.

The Mind on Fire is an intellectual biography of Emerson, although Richardson says that he ended up including more routine biography than he intended to in order to help the reader understand the development of his thought. Also to the point for Goodreads members: you’ll end up doubling or tripling the length of your ‘to-read’ list. I started off listening to this, but quickly headed to the library so I could have a hard copy as well to source the sources.

Luckily for Richardson, Emerson left a biographer’s dream: a vast journal that recorded his readings and reflections from his boyhood onward. Emerson himself indexed the journals repeatedly and drew on them heavily for his speeches and essays.

And he read everything. The classics of course, but he also read widely in Asian religion and philosophy (Zoroastriansim, Buddhism, Hinduism), German biblical criticism, Swedenborg, de Stael, botany, government studies of social conditions, Goethe, translations from Arabic and Persian etc etc. He was heavily influenced by Hafez and Swedenborg, among so many of the others he read. He also returned again and again to books previously read to study them again in light of what he had read since.

Richardson's exposition details the wide span of the reading but grounds it by embedding the books in well-selected examples of how a particular author shaped his next speech or essay.

Put simply, I highly recommend this book both for its illumination of Emerson’s writings and as a portrait of New England during his lifetime. He knew everybody who was anybody in New England, and a good chunk of ‘anybody’ in England. His friendships with Carlyle, Thoreau, Fuller, and others are thoroughly discussed here, along with how they expanded his reading.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

As with RR's excellent Thoreau: A Life of the Mind," this is a bio of a reader more than a chronological account of a life, and if indeed we are what we read, then RR provides a fascinating portrayal of one of the country's most important thinkers. (one small but intriguing detail: RWE often didn't finish books he was reading; rather, he claimed to have developed an ability to find what he considered most useful in a given work, and put aside the rest. That's quite liberating for any devoted reader who feels guilty for not finishing every book started!)

In addition to a moving account of RWE's life, RR provides an intellectual history of the century. His accounts of how ideas evolve through conversation and especially correpsondence provides an important picture of the process of public and private intellectual debate. In RR's detailed but accessible renderings, such debates become the stuff of brainy thrillers.

For all the high-powered intellect on display here, RR never loses sight of the fact that ideas don't mean much without flesh and blood people to embody them. The Prologue's opening description of RWE visiting and opening the coffin of his deceased wife Ellen is more than just a bit of gothic detail to hook the reader; rather, RR uses it to explain a central motif in RWE's work throughout his adult life -- the need for "direct, unmediated experience" as a means of "striv(ing) for an original relation to the Universe."

Though purely as a matter of personal taste for the respective figures, I preferred RR's bio of Thoreau, but in all honesty, I think the Emerson is the greater achievement. Nonetheless, I would recommend reading both. Far from repeating key points and ideas -- since T and E knew each other well -- these works complement each other very well.

Intellectual bio's just don't get any better than this.
Though I've never been particularly attracted to the work of William James, I plan on reading RR's recent bio of that man, figuring that if it's anywhere near as good as this book, it will be an equally enlightening and enjoyable read.

[Sher · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE cultural and intellectual biography about Ralph Waldo Emerson. It wasn't planned, but I read this book concurrently with Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, and so I was able to consider closely how the Emerson bio related events in comparison to the more recent Fuller biography. The authors took the primary sources in many of the same ways, but they did not agree across the board--especially in the personal relationship between Emerson and Margaret Fuller and other female Transcendentalists of the period. Plus the Fuller biography is less sympathetic toward Emerson, which was helpful, because Richardson biography does not present Emerson in relationship to feminist interests of the day. The Richardson biography glosses over Emerson's troubled second marriage and fails to present the darker side of his male nineteenth century persona. And, the Fuller biography stresses these areas, so I was able to see Emerson somewhere in the middle. My understand is much more complete having read these books concurrently.

This biography is comprehensive and detailed: it covers every literary and religious influence, all of Emerson's writings, and each major and minor figure having anything to do with Emerson and the Transcendental movement.

[Keith Skinner · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this several years after reading Richardson's biography of Thoreau, A Life of the Mind, and after my first visit to Concord. In fact, I found this book in one of the Concord bookstores and immediately snatched it up, motivated partially by my memory of the Thoreau book and and partially by my visit to Emerson's house earlier that day.

The title of this book says it all. When you crack open the cover and turn past the flyleaf, you will embark upon an incredible journey in witnessing the deeds and transformations of a man who must rank as one of the most intriguing thinkers of all time. Richardson lets the story unfold in two different tracks, showing us the external world that influences Emerson while deftly allowing us to explore Emerson's emerging thoughts through the use of journals, letters and published works. We see a man who constantly struggles with the reconciliation of his New England Christian principles and the truths that he distills from his constant examination and re-examination of the world around him.

This book completely changed my earlier impressions of Emerson. Rather than a principled but somewhat despotic voice of Transcendentalism, he was a seeker and his written work was simply Waldo the man working through his feelings and perceptions, perhaps without a hope of ever arriving at a conclusion. If he spouted platitudes, he was his own intended audience rather than the world at large.

[Charlene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Six hundred pages, a literary biography of a New England intellectual & essay writer -- and I thoroughly enjoyed it, surprising myself.

Visited Concord for a day on a recent trip to Boston & toured both the Orchard House and Emerson's home (and walked around Walden Pond). Had been expecting to enjoy & appreciate Louisa May Alcott's family home but the Emerson home and his friendship & support of the Concord literary folks caught my attention in a way that reading "Self-Reliance" in an American lit class long ago did not. I looked at books on Thoreau, Alcott, Margaret Fuller but somehow, he was the one I wanted to read about first.

Author concentrates on Emerson's intellectual life but there are biographical details in this also, of course. Emerson himself kept such extensive journals and notebooks on his reading & ideas that I am impressed with how much material the author himself must have had to read to be able to tell this story of how Emerson's philosophy & opinions developed over the decades.

It seems Emerson had a great gift and appreciation for friends; he was generous with time and sometimes money, if needed, to support them. Book does not try to speculate, beyond written sources, into Emerson's second marriage or his brief friendship break with Thoreau which is refreshing.

There were many things about Emerson & 19th century literary life that surprised me, especially the wide range of his reading. I expected European & Classic authors of all subjects but he was also reading Hindu, Chinese, Islamic (especially Sufi) and Persian texts, both Zoroastrian and medieval Persian poetry.

He wrote & spoke in favor of the Cherokee fight against removal, animal rights and abolition. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law passed, he was a very active abolitionist, supporting John Brown, etc. He was fully engaged in literature, philosophy, and the social concerns of his times.

I don't know that this book has inspired me to read any of his actual works or sources but it has inspired me to want to know more about this New England community of writers and thinkers. Maybe Richardson's biography of Thoreau? I really like Richardson's style; the short chapters kept me on track. Or maybe the biography of Margaret Fuller or the Peabody sisters by Megan Marshall.

Probably this book should be a 4 star and it was amazing to me that I looked forward everyday to reading it so a 5 for me.

[Yesterday's Muse Bookstore · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is THE biography of Emerson. Not only does it cover the complete expanse of Emerson's life and work, it accurately and unapologetically follows the development of Emerson's skills as a writer and thinker.

Many biographies adopt a perspective of adulation towards their subject, which in some cases can cloud the reality of things. Richardson maintains an objectivity that allows him to paint an accurate portrait.

In addition, Richardson's decision to approach Emerson in this way highlights how effective was Emerson's famous work ethic in honing his talents and progressing towards new ideas.

For the scholar, this book also provides an extensive bibliography of works read by Emerson throughout his life, as well as a chronology of when he read them, which lends important insight, and gives readers an opportunity to walk in Emerson's footsteps.

[Ashley Adams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Robert D. Richardson also wrote a biography on Thoreau that got great reviews. Indeed, Richardson knows what he is talking about. His facts are solid, and his story clear. I finished the reading with a greater appreciation for the relationships Thoreau cultivated with other transcendental figures of his time.... It was kind of boring.

Emerson himself put a strong emphasis on the art of writing biography. Boldly, Emerson said, "All history is biography." With that in mind, I think Richardson's biography lacked the... luster needed to adequately depict Emerson's place in history.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

An epic biography - inspired writing and thoughtful approach to make the dense content accessible. However this was over written and much too detailed to maintain a consistent rhythm of documenting such a rich life. It felt uncurated, without an agenda - perhaps a bit like Emerson’s life. Absolutely exhausted everything in him but I wondered why the reader is left to assume this impact of this man’s life. Was all of this effort indicative of a life well lived or yet another Relentless pursuit of something never found?

[Jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Richardson says he wrote an intellectual biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) but had to include the normal biography information so the reader would have context to the events. Richardson has, as much as possible, let Emerson speak for himself through his published works, his journals and note books, his letters and reported conversations. The author not only covers Emerson’s writings and his influence on others but his life as he experienced it. Richardson gives careful attention to the enormous range of Emerson’s readings and to his friendships. Richardson goes into Emerson’s founding of the Transcendentalist Club.

The author points out the wide range of people that Emerson influenced such as, Thoreau, Alcott, Dickerson, Fuller, Whitman, and Frost. He also inspired Nietzsche, William James, Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf and Jorge Luis Borges.

Richardson did meticulous research for the book. The book is more or less easy to read but I felt there were too many repetitions and diversions that were unnecessary to the main point of the biography. I did enjoy learning more about Emerson. I read this as an audiobook downloaded from Audible. The book was 27 hours long and Michael McConnohie narrated the book.

[Brian Willis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This intellectual biography covers all the major strains of thought distilled into Emerson's own writing and the development of his mind. It does cover major biographical events but those events are secondary to the reading and writing of Emerson himself. Although there are noteworthy events in Emerson's life, they do seem to be mostly segregated from his intellectual life, for which he is rightly renowned. It's the right approach to take.

Often, this biography reads like a laundry list of the reading Emerson conducted, especially in the first 100 pps. However, the book really comes alive as he begins to engage his thoughts with his Concord neighbors and the European world. Highlights are his meetings with Carlyle, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, as well as the obvious interactions with Thoreau and other intellectuals. It does read faster than it looks like, with shorter chapters highlighting key areas of intellectual development as well as major biographical events.

If you want to read about Emerson, other than reading his works themselves, this is the book.

[Nasar · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Teaching is the perpetual end and office of all things. Teaching, instruction is the main design that shines through the sky and earth.” We may smile at the young man who identifies his next career step with the final purpose of the universe, yet along with the overearnest tone is a fresh awareness of design in nature: “The end of being is to know; and if you say, the end of knowledge is action,—why, yes, but the end of that action again, is knowledge.”
... For Emerson it is always the instructed eye, not the object seen, that gives the highest delight, that connects us with the world. Partly for that reason his favorite symbol for inquiry and knowledge and wisdom was the image of the active eye. He knew the importance of the eye. He liked Tacitus’s saying that “in battle the eye is first conquered.”

Wonderful.

[Cliff M · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a long winded account of the life of a long winded (but good) person. Emerson consumed books the way the rest of us consume oxygen. I am sure Richardson’s lists of books Emerson read in any particular month are not comprehensive (nor do they try to be), which makes Emerson’s bibliomania even more striking.

But what did Emerson achieve? I was left with the impression that he did little with his acquired knowledge. Perhaps I need to read more of his original work to correct this impression? This book is almost devoid of any sense of achievement. Is that the fault of the book or the man? His best friend Thoreau always seemed more practical and action oriented to me (and I love his writing).

[Chrissie]

*********************
Emerson: The Mind on Fire TBR
Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind TBR

[Carnegie Olson · Rating 2 out of 5]

To be fair, I very much respect the scholarship, vision and mythological savvy, so to say, within the work of Robert Richardson. I liked his biographies of Thoreau and William James. Emerson, however, is not for me. I'm at chapter 58 of 100 and it's been a month since I even touched this book. I need to allow myself to DNF this so as to set anything good about it free. Emerson apparently wasn't a meddler and his hyper-public lifestyle - the blustery travels and over-amped public speaking engagements for example - may have been part of the required perspective of the time for intellectuals but frankly I just don't understand his appeal in terms of ideas or writing style. "When he was reaching for the highest, most authoritative voice he could," suggests Richardson, "Emerson invoked 'a certain poet,' who was this Osman-self, a sort of interior 'other.'" Hmm. Perhaps this Osman-self is responsible for the unintelligibility of lines such as, "Her wit is the wild horse of the desert who snuffs the sirocco and scours the palm grove without having learned his paces in the stadium" (351). Ugh. The book is full of such spaced-out Emersonian nonsense and I'm at a loss to explain why Richardson found these worthy examples to include.

Emerson was hoping for a 'visitation of the high muse,' for a visionary experience of life-altering intensity. He was after the sort of experience with which he could lift the reader or hearer "by a happy violence into a religious beatitude, or into a Socratic trance and imparadise him in ideas" (352).

Yikes. As much as I tend to appreciate romanticism and what I would term a mythic sensitivity, these types of overt ambitions from a writer seem self-indulgent at best and self-important at worst. Do fans of Blake, for example, tend to enjoy Emerson? - I don't know. Meanwhile, I suppose I just don't like Emerson and reading a biography of him, no matter how smartly rendered, will never suffice to enlighten me about what others see in him. Oh well.

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let's face it. I'm never going to finish this book. Too many distractions. I should just click five stars and call it a day.

From the preface:
   This book was originally planned as an intellectual biography, a companion piece to Henry Thoreau; A Life of the Mind. My approach to both Thoreau and Emerson has been to read what they read and then to relate their reading to their writing. The story, however - and it is a story - of Emerson's intellectual odyssey turned out to be incomprehensible apart from his personal and social life. The result is an intellectual biography as well as a portrait of the whole man. A great deal of newly available material has brought to light an Emerson strikingly more lively than the plaster sage of Concord.
   Emerson lived for ideas, but he did so with the reckless, headlong ardor of a lover. He associated the human mind and its capacity for thought with activity and energy. He hated the passive notion of the mind as a blank slate. He concentrated instead on the individual’s sources of power, on access to the central fires that ignite the mind. His main image of the creative mind is of a volcano. “We must have not only hydrogen in balloons and steel springs under coaches,” he wrote, “but we must have fire under the Andes at the core of the world.”

[Michaela Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Emerson: A Mind on Fire" by Robert Richardson gives the intellectual journey of Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his days at Harvard, through a brief - though successful - church career, and to his celebrated radical writings - revolving a firery abolitionist, stauch idealist, and sometimes feminist, transandentalist. Emerson himself is potrayed as a fearless, good-humored, deeply interested philosopher as well as a prophetic reader. He seems wonderfully open to new information, growing his journals and his intellectual questioning; he connects his theories in eloquent ways, and keeps us interested, in his joyful salute to each new idea. Suprising to me was his varied and prodigious reading as well as an interest in Hindu, Sufi, and Buddhist philosophies, and his love of Persian poetry. This book blesses us with a healthy dose of discussion concerning a writer in his public vs. private life, and how the effects of fame can mangle the deeper tenants of a subtle man's work. Richardson makes good use of Emerson's extensive journals and with a decerning eye follows his reading list and influences.

[Frank Strada · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow - what a read! If you want to know more about Emerson or transcendentalism or the intellectual history of the western world in the early to middle 19th century, then this is the book for you. (I leave out the later part of the century because Richardson barely mentions American pragmatism, Peirce, James or Dewey). Now I know I have listed this book in my "read" category, but I must admit I didn't read every word. Out of almost 600 pages, I may have read the equivalent of 450 to 500. There are some chapters, all of them short, from 3 or 4 pages to 8 or 10, that simply didn't interest me. I was mostly drawn by the passages on transcendentalism and Emerson's relationships with other well know Americans, such as Margaret Fuller and Henry Thoreau. And also the influence of European thinkers from Plato to Kant to Hegel and Goethe on Emerson's thinking. All in all, a terrific read, but not for the faint of heart. It's a mighty tome, perfect for the shelf of anyone interested in the Western intellectual tradition. Read some of it and put it back on the shelf. But return to it again and again.

[Daniel]

I had imagined that Emerson had just walked into the world, fully formed with his linguistic brilliance already intact and his smoldering, cannon-blast of a writing style already primed and ready. His biography disabused me of that notion. He was a real person and real people tend to write a lot of terrible, unoriginal works before they ever get to something worthwhile. Worth remembering.
I also enjoyed seeing a life from end to end (I rarely go in for biographies). His life never had a climax, was rarely perfect, had plenty of loss in it. I think this is generally how lives go. Another thing I'd like to remember.
Above all, I am excited to read more Emerson with an eye to the philosophy that ran through it.

[Victoria Weinstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the definitive bio on Emerson and well-deserves all the praise it has earned. A marvelous and gripping read, not to be missed by any of RWE's admirers.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a dense, detailed analysis of the journals Emerson kept and the books he read.

[Jessica · Rating 2 out of 5]

I started this book over 11 years ago. I read it off and on for a few months and then it sat on the nightstand and then I made it the holder for my alarm clock. And I liked the way it looked…for a few years…. and then I feel like it kind of mocked me. And then recently I realized audible credits expire after a year (which irritates me) and lo and behold they had it available in audio format. And so I started listening again a month or so ago. I wish I could remember who picked it for a bookclub book. Because I might whack them over the head with this doorstop. I do remember that no one finished it and several of us had to order it in hard back for $20 some odd dollars. This is a ridiculously long book with excruciating detail that is geared towards a philosopher or a historian. Not a literature enthusiast. I’m assuming this had to be written by a professor who makes it required reading for a class. I see it’s $45 now on Amazon. I can’t decide if I should try to sell it or leave it in some poor souls little library. Decisions.

Quote that felt timely for the first 100 days of not making America great again: “This has ceased to be a representative government when the statute itself fastens penalties of treason on acts of common humanity……I submit that all government is bankrupt, all law turned upside down; that the government itself is treason.”

Canon law simply said that “neither allegiance nor oath can bind to obey that which is wrong.”

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every couple of days I would read a chapter or two to get some food for thought. I recommend keeping a highlighter ready (if you do that sort of thing) because their are gems from Emerson and others you’ll want to look back at when you skim through on a re-read (again, if you do that sort of thing.) The actual biography itself ranges from ok to good—Richardson’s depth of research garners respect—but I felt it was the aphorisms and poems that kept me engaged throughout this two-pound paperback. Excerpts from Emerson hit that sweet spot between head-buzzing poetry and statements of everyday truths. He is at his best transforming abstract thought into accessible language, and every other page keeps you smiling in agreement.

Emerson draws up two columns. In one there are fate, nature, determinism and circumstance. In the second column stand power, thought, freedom, and will. The two columns relate in a process Emerson is now willing to call ‘history.’ “History,” he says, “is the action and reaction of these two, Nature and Thought”…there is unity and there is advance. The unity lies in the fact that the entire second column…is just as necessary, as fated, as the first column…For Emerson is at last convinced that the universe can be understood as “advance out of fate into freedom.”
Emerson began by asking, “How should I lead my life?” The answer given…is “Pursue freedom.”

i.e. What doesn't kill you...
You go through good times and bad, and emerge wiser for it. The experience of both states are encoded in your DNA of understanding. Keep adding to the building blocks of your understanding, not wither away because of it. Emerson lost many loved ones, so when he affirms life by saying "pursue freedom," for me it carries a lot of weight.

This tome of one of the all-time greats expanded my perspective and lead me to some of Emerson’s best works: “Self-Reliance”, “Fate”, “The Poet”, “Illusions” and “Representative Men.” I like this guy Emerson, I’m indebted to him and I’m grateful his writings live on.

---

The days are gods. That is, everything is divine.
Creation is continuous. There is no other world; this one is all there is.
Every day is the day of judgement.
The purpose of life is individual self-cultivation, self-expression, and fulfillment.
Poetry liberates. Thought is also free.
The powers of the soul are commensurate with its needs; each new day challenges us with its adequacy and our own.
Fundamental perceptions are intuitive and inarguable; all important truths, whether of physics or ethics, must at last be self-evident.
Nothing great is ever accomplished without enthusiasm.
Life is an ecstasy; Thoreau has it right when he says, “Surely joy is the condition of life.”
Criticism and commentary, if they are not in the service of enthusiasm and ecstasy, are idle at best, destructive at worst. Your work, as Ruskin says, should be the praise of what you love.

[Gydle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great accompaniment to reading Emerson’s work. The stories of his life and family, the excerpts from his letters, put into context the works that are iconically “Emerson” and make a much fuller and more interesting picture of a man who is deeply enmeshed in this pivotal period in American intellectual history. Transcendentalism has been thought of as the first truly American philosophy, and it’s not easy to pin down. Emerson’s life was a continued attempt to try and understand and reconcile reason and spirit, science and the divine, inspired by nature and constantly supporting others who were on the same quest. I loved learning about the crazy commie farm project of the Alcotts (free love before the hippies!) and about Emerson’s own emotional (if not physical) dalliances with various female intellectuals of the time. I’m stunned by the amount of reading he did, his constant need to drum up money on the lecture circuit, even when he’d become famous, and inspired in this age of fear and partisanship by his insistance on self-reliance and personal integrity rather than blind obedience to authority and institution. He was an abolitionist when it was not “kosher” to be so, he supported the rights of women and immigrants.
I have to agree with Emerson that there is no history, there’s only biography. This book is an excellent way to get a feel for this particular time in American history. So many of the themes and issues have not changed much in the interim.
To boot: “It is remarked of the Americans that they value dexterity too much, and honor too little, that they think they praise a man more by saying that he is “smart” than by saying he is right.”
Emerson is kind of hard to read today because of the style - long, winding sentences, lots of commas, very descriptive prose. This book helps enormously by clarifying the arguments just enough that I can then go and read the original and because of the context, it is richer and makes a lot more sense.
I listened to this on audible, and had to go at 1.25x speed because the narrator spoke too slowly for me. I’d prefer a physical copy of the book because there are sections I’d like to be able to go back and look at.

[Richard Bracken · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was so taken by his essay on Compensation a number of years ago (I’ve recommended it to a half dozen people) that I wanted to someday read a biography of it’s author, Ralph Waldo Emerson. A man whose lifelong question seemed to have been, not, “what can I know”, but “how should I live”?

His reading list was insane, and I’ve added a few books to my mine that he seemed to particularly appreciate. He seems to have been a very decent man his entire life.

To the extent that a King might be a “doer” and a philosopher a sort of “intellectual”, beyond rightly taking an ardent abolitionist position, he never seemed to rise to that of a Philosopher King, which was my own unfair expectation of the poor fellow, for he was mostly a thinker and lecturer. For instance, at one point in his early career he took a turn as a pastor of a congregation. He gave exceptional sermons in church, but was hopeless in pastoral work among his flock.

”Attending the deathbed of an old revolutionary soldier named Captain Greene, Emerson could think of nothing to say. Seeing a collection of medicine bottles on the table beside the captain’s bed, he began to talk about glassmaking. “Young man,” said the not-yet-departed hero, “If you don’t know your business, you had better go home.”

I came away from this book wanting to read a few more of Emerson’s essays, and the author of this book, in describing the sort of reader Emerson was, gave me some unexpected insight into the type of reader I may best identify with. Looking at the way I highlight and review, I couldn’t help but wonder if I might not be a sort of “Golconda”, too. Who knows, haha!

”Coleridge notes that there are four kinds of readers: the hourglass, the sponge, the jelly bag, and the Golconda. In the first everything that runs in runs right out again. The sponge gives out all it took in, only a little dirtier. The jelly bag keeps only the refuse. The Golconda runs everything through a sieve and keeps only the diamonds”.

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A reread.

[Pastor Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am not an Emerson fan. I describe his writing as pure bloviating nonsense much of the time. Reminds me of people who love to hear themselves talk but say next to nothing. He would make a great evangelical preacher these days.

But I am a huge fan of biography. I am very much aware of the (detrimental) impact of American Romanticism and the fact that Emerson is at the top of everyone's list of "great romantic authors". They preached and taught a Naturalism that served as a collective "John the Anti-Baptist" movement to prepare the way for Darwin and the Evolutionist movement that decimated our government schools and swept through our colleges and seminaries with a flood of apostasy and skepticism.

I know all of that and for that reason I understand the importance of learning from it all. And the best, most interesting way to learn in my opinion is through history and, specifically, biography (and autobiography when possible). That is why I enjoyed this book about a man and movement that makes me sick. It's real. It happened. And this book was a good one.

Well written. That's the best I can say. If you have any interest in American history, literature, anthropology, philosophy and even theology, you'll find this one very interesting.

[Karen Floyd · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a magnificent intellectual biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson, concentrating on his education, both in school and afterwards on his own, and the development of his thinking and ideas. I was fascinated and awed by the depth and breadth of his reading and how it shaped his beliefs. His mind was always questing, never static, and his ideas were always in flux, always progressing. I will admit that I didn't agree with all of his ideas, found some of them rather hard to follow, even a little far-fetched. And I definitely resented the way he treated his second wife, Lidian. He had intense emotional relationships with several younger women, including Margaret Fuller, leaving his wife to do the usual homemaker things and make the best of it. He believed that the development of the self was the most important thing a person could do in life, which did lead to a very self-centered outlook. I do highly recommend this book, which opens a window on a particular time and on perhaps the most important man of that time.
I was saddened to hear of Robert Richardson's recent death. He was a fine writer and historian and will certainly be missed.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel like I've been reading this for months and the size and depth is part of the point. It's clearly a monumental achievement and by reading 'alongside' Emerson, Richardson brings the reader almost uncannily close to Emerson and the drift of his thoughts. I feel I understand this turbulent time (intellectually) better than ever and have a closer understanding of American thought and, particularly, the Kantian/Coleridgean (is that even an adjective) revolution. The downside to Richardson's approach is any sense of critical distance: this is, essentially, an hagiography, which is fine but Emerson's philosophy can be frustratingly intangible and opaque and Richardson doesn't acknowledge this or take it on.

[Annelise Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert D. Richardson's biography on the Ralph Waldo Emerson is the best biography I have ever read on any historical figure. It is full of insightful observations on who Emerson really was as a human being and scholar. I came to this biography because I was interested in Emerson's ideas on self-reliance and how he operated as an independent scholar. I got so much more than I could have ever anticipated and have listened to it first on audible and then bought the book to read it again and then to study. Richardson has provided a full account of who Emerson was and how he developed his ideas on real-world experience. 10/10

[Jeff Lacy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was expecting something more like Henry Adams’ Autobiography. This was misery, a python squeezing the life out of me. Hence the amount of time it took me to finish this book. I suppose if you have read some or a good amount of Emerson this would be the book for you. I desired a concise biography. This got bogged down. The language of the period and of Emerson may throw you off as pretentious and so formal and literary, that you couldn’t understand a wit of him. I feel relieved I have survived this behemoth. However, however, this is a worthwhile book for the writer, the critical thinker, the sophisticated reader, the philosopher, or the student of biographies.