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  • Published: 29 January 2014
  • ISBN: 9781585426423
  • Imprint: Tarcher
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $27.99

The Spiritual Emerson

Essential Works by Ralph Waldo Emerson



This concise volume collects the core writings that have made Ralph Waldo Emerson into a key source of insight for spiritual seekers of every faith—with an introduction by the bestselling philosopher Jacob Needleman.

Here is the essential collection of Emerson’s spiritual thought for those readers who understand the transformative quality of ideas. It is concise and suited to years of rereading and contemplation, offering the essays that trace the arc of the inner message brought by America’s “Yankee Mystic.

The Spiritual Emerson features many of Emerson’s landmark works. Yet also included are overlooked classics, such as the essays “Fate” and “Success,” which served as major sources of inspiration to some of the leading American metaphysical thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The introduction by religious scholar and philosopher Jacob Needleman frames—historically and philosophically—the development of Emerson’s thought and explores why it has such a powerful hold on us today.

  • Published: 29 January 2014
  • ISBN: 9781585426423
  • Imprint: Tarcher
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $27.99

About the author

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Date: 2013-08-06
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803­-1882) was a renowned lecturer and writer, whose ideas on philosophy, religion, and literature influenced many writers, including Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. After an undergraduate career at Harvard, he studied at Harvard Divinity School and became an ordained minister, continuing a long line of ministers in his family. He traveled widely and lectured, and became well known for his publications Essays and Nature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the son of a Unitarian minister and a chaplain during the American Revolution, was born in 1803 in Boston. He attended the Boston Latin School, and in 1817 entered Harvard, graduating in 1820. Emerson supported himself as a schoolteacher from 1821-26. In 1826 he was 'approbated to preach,' and in 1829 became pastor of the Scond Church (Unitarian) in Boston. That same year he married Ellen Louise Tucker, who was to die of tuberculosis only seventeen months later.

In 1832 Emerson resigned his pastorate and traveled to Eurpe, where he met Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle. He settled in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1834, where he began a new career as a public lecturer, and married Lydia Jackson a year later. A group that gathered around Emerson in Concord came to be known as 'the Concord school,' and included Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller.

Every year Emerson made a lecture tour; and these lectures were the source of most of his essays. Nature (1836), his first published work, contained the essence of his transcendental philosophy, which views the world of phenomena as a sort of symbol of the inner life and emphasizes individual freedom and self-reliance. Emerson's address to the Phi Beta Kappa society of Harvard (1837) and another address to the graduating class of the Harvard Divinity School (1838) applied his doctrine to the scholar and the clergyman, provoking sharp controversy. An ardent abolitionist, Emerson lectured and wrote widely against slavery from the 1840's through the Civil War.

His principal publications include two volumes of Essays (1841, 1844), Poems (1847), Representative Men (1850), The Conduct of Life (1860), and Society and Solitude (1870). He died of pneumonia in 1882 and was buried in Concord.

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