More than two centuries after his birth, Ralph Waldo Emerson remains one of the presiding spirits in American culture. Yet his reputation as the starry-eyed prophet of self-reliance has obscured a complicated figure who spent a lifetime wrestling with injustice, philosophy, art, desire, and suffering. Marcus introduces readers to this Emerson, a writer of self-interrogating genius whose visionary flights are always grounded in Yankee shrewdness. This Emerson is a rebel – a lover, a friend, a husband, and a father. Having declared his great topic to be the infinitude of the private man, he is nonetheless an intensely social being who develops Transcendentalism in the company of others. And although he resists political activism early on, the burning issue of slavery ultimately transforms him from cloistered metaphysician to fiery abolitionist.
