Introduction

Summary

A book that reprints contemporary reviews of the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau must be weighted in favor of the former. Emerson published an address celebrating Concord's centennial in 1835 and followed it with his first major work, Nature, the next year. Before his death in 1882, he published eight books of essays, two original volumes of poetry, and five major addresses. His books were published and widely reviewed in England, where a number of original collections of his essays and addresses were put together. In addition, by the mid-1840s, he had become known as the leading spokesman for the Transcendentalist movement in America. On the other hand, Thoreau published two books during his lifetime, neither of which had an English edition until two decades after his death in 1862. The beginnings of his reputation as a major American writer did not come until nearly half a century after Emerson had been firmly established in his role as a writer of importance.

The present volume, therefore, devotes nearly four times as much space to reviews of Emerson's writings as it does to reviews of Thoreau's works. This disparity in the number of words allotted to each writer reflects both their relative importance as seen by their contemporaries and the length of their careers. Reviews of sixteen Emerson titles are represented in this book, as compared to only two by Thoreau (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden, both published while he was alive). Because of this, I have approached my discussion of the reviews of each man's works differently in this introduction.