In the late 1830s, Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist, poet, lecturer, and leader of the Transcendentalist movement, publicly called for a radical nationwide vocational reinvention, and an idealistic group of collegians eagerly responded. Assuming the role of mentor, editor, and promoter, Emerson freely offered them his time, financial support, and anti-materialistic counsel, and profoundly shaped the careers of his young acolytes—including Henry David Thoreau, renowned journalist and women’s rights advocate Margaret Fuller, and lesser-known literary figures such as Samuel Ward and reckless romantic poets Jones Very, Ellery Channing, and Charles Newcomb. Author David Dowling’s history of the professional and personal relationships between Emerson and his protégés—a remarkable collaboration that alternately proved fruitful and destructive, tension-filled and liberating—is a fascinating true story of altruism, ego, influence, pettiness, genius, and the bold attempt to reshape the literary market of the mid-nineteenth century.

"This book tells the story of their friendship. Harmon Smith emphasizes their personal bond, but also shows how their relationship affected their thought and writing and was in turn influenced by their careers."--BOOK JACKET.

Jones Very's poetry reflects the darker side of America's Transcendentalists, and this study explores contradictions between his ecstatic verse and his exaltation of sin. Very lived the life of a mystic, speaking alternately as a 19th-century Jeremiah and the new American Messiah, for less than two years. During this period, he wrote a small corpus of verse that was powerful and pure, yet after he "recovered," he produced merely a larger body of mediocre poetry. As the millennium approaches, his ecstatic verse speaks more strongly than ever before. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau have traditionally been portrayed as alienated outsiders, isolated voices of opposition to a society that failed to heed their words. More recently, they have been seen as unwitting advocates of capitalist culture, their texts and careers driven by its hidden logic even as they indicted its excesses. In Sublime Thoughts/Penny Wisdom Richard F. Teichgraeber III rejects both of these views to offer a revisionist account of the relation of Emerson and Thoreau to the emerging market culture of antebellum America. Emerson and Thoreau, Teichgraeber argues, were engaged with their contemporary readers in a common conversation about the institutions, conduct, and values of a Northern society experiencing extensive and radical social changes, and encountering in Southern slavery a dramatic challenge to its new political and economic way of life. Teichgraeber contends that Emerson and Thoreau knew their own purposes as social critics and set about achieving them in their published writings. In turn, the new commercial mediators of antebellum culture--publishers, editors, reviewers, and booksellers--introduced the two Concord writers to ordinary readers, discussed their works with surprising discernment, and constructed the images by which Emerson and Thoreau would eventually be canonized in American literature. "Teichgraeber's study has extremely important implications for the much-gnawed question of the relationship of Emerson and Thoreau to American culture. The general opinion right now is that they have somehow been canonized by a cultural elite and therefore, at best, can claim only to be representative men.' Teichgraeber demonstrates thatmuch more can be claimed for them--that during their own lives and careers they touched a popular nerve, so that their canonization was not an act of a cultural elite but an expression of democracy."--James Hoopes, Babson College.

Inner conflict is fought out in room and on hills near Florence, Italy.

The essays in this volume represent renewed interest in the history of the American book. Inspired by the work of William Charvat, the contributors trace the complex web of "reciprocal influences" among authors, readers, and the publishing trade in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.