Understanding Emerson: "The American Scholar" and His Struggle for Self-Reliance
"A detailed, rigorous, yet highly readable and engaging story."--Library Journal"As Sacks shows, in his public lectures Emerson took pains not to seem too controversial. . . . But standing before a closed circuit of his intellectual peers, he came out foursquare for a notion of scholarship that, for all its influence on American writers, transcended not only national but also institutional boundaries. . . . Sacks is a classical historian and is very good at showing how well Emerson's mastery of classical rhetoric served him in this address. . . . Reading Emerson's speech today, his turns of phrase may strike us as rather demure, but to his auditors they were fighting words."--Frank Wilson,The Philadelphia Inquirer"Sack's subtle and fine-meshedUnderstanding Emersonexamines the circumstances in which Emerson's first major public statement . . . took shape. Sacks shows how complicated the occasion was, and how easy it would have been . . . for Emerson to fulfill the expectations of his audience and Alma Mater. Instead, he heeded the hopes of young friends like Thoreau and deliberately insulted almost everyone in the audience."--Christopher Benfey,Times Literary Supplement"Sacks's Emerson is very much a man of his milieu, a stubborn and driven Yankee. . . . Sacks reveals Emerson as a struggling, uncertain figure, whose hunger to achieve self-reliance warred constantly against his need for approval from other quarters. His great effort of self-assertion seems more sympathetic, and less self-indulgent, when seen in this light."--Wilfred M. McClay,The Weekly Standard