"A centennial book"--Half title page.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 585-656) and index.

[pt. I.] The student : Emerson at Harvard ; The march of mind ; Home and family ; The angel of death ; Scottish common sense ; The brothers Emerson ; The young writer ; The paradise of dictionaries and critics ; Mme. de Sta�el and the other Germany ; Divinity studies -- [pt. II.] Divinity : Pray without ceasing ; The Prince of Lipona ; The balance beam ; Ellen Tucker ; Ordination and marriage: love and reason ; We are what we know ; Gerando and the first philosophy ; The wreck of earthly good ; In my study my faith is perfect ; Separation ; A terrible freedom -- [pt. III.] The inner light : The American eye ; I will be a naturalist ; A white day in my years ; The instructed eye ; Mary Rotch: life without choice ; A living leaping logos ; A theory of Animated nature ; Each and all ; Confluence -- [pt. IV.] Nature : Lidian ; The new Jerusalem ; The art of writing. Jakob Boehme ; Marriage and Concord ; Alcott and English literature ; All in each: writing nature ; Nature: the laws of the world ; Nature: the apocalypse of the mind ; Margaret Fuller -- [pt. V.] Go alone : The symposium ; The forging of the anchor ; We are not children of time ; The American scholar ; Casting off ; Human culture ; The peace principle and the Cherokee Trail of Tears ; Henry Thoreau ; Go alone: refuse the great models -- [pt. VI.] These flying days : New books, new problems ; Jones Very ; The attainable self ; Home and family ; Writing essays ; The heart has its jubilees ; Identity and metamorphosis ; Brook Farm and Margaret Fuller ; Pythagoras and Pliotinus ; Osman's ring: a work of ecstasy ; The frightful hollows of space -- [pt. VII.] Children of the fire : The dream of community ; Children of the fire ; Emerson's Dial ; New views ; The world ; The young American ; Emerson's emancipation address ; Essays on power ; Ex oriente lux -- [pt. VIII.] The natural history of intellect : Representative men ; The lecturer ; Persia and poetry ; The new domestic order. Poems ; The orchard keeper ; I shall never graduate ; England ; The natural history of intellect ; Chartism and revolution -- [pt. IX.] The science of liberty : Return: quarrel with Thoreau ; The Walden Sierras. Quetelet ; Therienism and the Hegelian moment ; The west ; The matter of Margaret ; The tragic ; The conduct of life ; The Fugitive Slave Act ; The science of liberty -- [pt. X.] Fame : My platoon ; Country walking and the sea ; English traits ; Fame ; Whitman ; The remedy at the hour of need ; The power and terror of thought -- [pt. XI.] Endings : Memory ; Civil War. Death of Thoreau ; Terminus ; May day ; Harvard. California. Fire ; Philae and Parnassus ; Fire at the core of the world -- Genealogies -- Chronology of the life of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

This comprehensive portrait of Emerson draws from newly available material, including correspondence between the Emerson brothers.

Society of American Historians Francis Parkman Prize, 1996.