Through his writing and his own personal philosophy, Ralph Waldo Emerson unburdened his young country of Europe's traditional sense of history and showed Americans how to be creators of their own circumstances. His mandate, which called for harmony with, rather than domestication of, nature, and for a reliance on individual integrity, rather than on materialistic institutions, is echoed in many of the great American philosophical and literary works of his time and ours, and has given an impetus to modern political and social activism.

Larzer Ziff's introduction to this collection of fifteen of Emerson's most significant writings provides the important backdrop to the society in which Emerson lived during his formative years.

Introduction   7
Suggestions for Further Reading   29
A Note on the Text   31

Essays

1. Nature 1836   35
2. The American Scholar 1837   83
3. An Address Delivered Before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge 1838   107
4. Man the Reformer 1841   129
5. History (Essays, First Series) 1841   149
6. Self-Reliance (Essays, First Series) 1841   175
7. The Over-Soul (Essays, First Series) 1841   205
8. Circles (Essays, First Series) 1841   225
9. The Transcendentalist 1842   239
10. The Poet (Essays, Second Series) 1844   259
11. Experience (Essays, Second Series) 1844   285
12. Montaigne; Or, the Skeptic (Representative Men) 1850   313
13. Napoleon; Or, the Man of the World (Representative Men) 1850   337
14. Fate (The Conduct of Life) 1860   361
15. Thoreau 1862   393