Presents an anthology of the best literary essays published in 2014, selected from American periodicals.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 - April 27, 1882), known professionally as Waldo Emerson, was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States. Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of transcendentalism in his 1836 essay "Nature." Following this groundbreaking work, he gave a speech entitled "The American Scholar" in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America's "intellectual Declaration of Independence."

Publisher Description

"The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future..." - Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar" (1837) The American Scholar (1837), is an address delivered by Ralph Waldo Emerson to the Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Emerson's writing was focused on providing a philosophical framework for escaping European culture and building a new, distinctly American identity. This essay is a declaration of independence of the United States intellectual community from Europe's. It also expresses the author's belief that the American scholar could only achieve a higher state of mind by rejecting old ideas and by thinking for himself, to become "Man Thinking" rather than "a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking," "the sluggard intellect of this continent."