Nietzsche said that he never travelled anywhere without a volume of Emerson’s essays in his pocket, while Mathew Arnold described Emerson as ‘the greatest prose writer of the century’. It is a remarkable writer who could at once appeal to a man considered a pillar of Victorian society, and to a man dedicated to bringing down such pillars. In his own time Emerson was considered a profoundly radical thinker, but after his death he was increasingly seen as a bland Boston Brahmin, contentedly ripening with the new England melons, benignly meditating on such viperous notions as the Over-soul.He is now appreciated as one of the truly seminal American writers, refusing all orthodoxies, complacencies and fixities–both a truly celebratory and deeply adversarial thinker.

A unique paperback edition, with introduction and chronology of Emerson’s life and times.