Understanding Emerson : "The American scholar" and his struggle for self-reliance /

In 1837, Emerson was invited to give the Phi Beta Kappa address to his alma mater, Harvard University. Sacks (history, Brown Univ.) sees the oration as a turning point in both Emerson's life and American letters, and he includes the entire address as an appendix. He limns Emerson as insecure and doubtful of his own ability and viewpoint prior to the address-in which he excoriates the academy for emphasizing "book learning" instead of encouraging "intuition"-but as subsequently emerging as his "own man," so to speak. The narrative relates Emerson's contacts with notable figures of the time, including Thomas Carlyle, Charles Wilson Elliot, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and others, and shows how Emerson was influenced by the thought of Plato, the Stoics, Goethe, Locke, and especially Kant, elements of whose writings are seen in the Transcendentalism of the time. In addition, Sacks shows how his thought has influenced American pragmatism. Although the case Sacks makes about Emerson's importance as an essayist, poet, and philosopher seems somewhat forced, this is a detailed, rigorous, yet highly readable and engaging story that belongs in American intellectual history and literature collections in academic and public libraries. [The bicentennial of Emerson's birth was May 25.-Ed.]-Leon H. Brodsky, U.S. Office of Personnel Management Lib., Washington, DC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.