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Waldo Emerson: A Biography
Gay Wilson Allen
Gay Wilson Allen's Waldo Emerson (1981) is the big, authoritative modern life of Ralph Waldo Emerson—the Concord essayist, lecturer, and reluctant prophet whose Transcendentalism gave American thought some of its founding scripture. Drawing on thousands of unpublished letters, Allen traces Emerson from a struggling young minister who resigned his pulpit over conscience, through his emergence as the sage of “Self-Reliance,” “Nature,” and the American scholar, to his long later career as the country's most quoted moral voice. At more than seven hundred pages it is thorough without being dry, attentive to both the inner development of Emerson's ideas and the texture of his domestic and public life. Widely honored on publication—winner of the Lowell Prize and a Pulitzer finalist—it stands with Ralph Rusk's earlier work as a standard biography. For readers drawn to Emerson, Transcendentalism, or nineteenth-century American culture, it's the definitive single volume.
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The author
Gay Wilson Allen (1903–1995) was an American literary scholar and biographer best known for The Solitary Singer, his landmark life of Walt Whitman. A specialist in nineteenth-century American writers, he brought decades of expertise to the Emerson biography.
The book
Published by Viking in 1981, Waldo Emerson: A Biography runs to more than 750 pages and draws heavily on previously unpublished letters. It follows Emerson's life and the parallel development of his prose and poetry, from his crisis of faith and departure from the ministry through the essays and lectures that made him a national figure.
How it has aged
It earned the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize and a Pulitzer nomination and remains one of the standard modern biographies, complementing Ralph Rusk's earlier Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Later studies have added interpretive angles, but Allen's remains a comprehensive and reliable narrative.
For more context
Read alongside Emerson's Essays and Robert Richardson's later Emerson: The Mind on Fire.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Gay Wilson Allen
- Publisher
- Viking Press
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 1981
- ISBN
- 0-670-74866-8
- Format
- Hardcover
- Shelf
- Biography & Memoir
- Location
- Maine