Even though the country was mired in economic recession, Emerson warned that, if education merely trained students for a career, it would lead them to despair. “The American Scholar” address was somewhat controversial (Edward Everett Hale remarked, “It was not very good, but very transcendental”), but when published as a pamphlet in an edition of 500 copies, it quickly sold out.

The following year Emerson was invited back to Harvard to speak to the graduating class of the Divinity School. The ideas he expressed on that occasion were essentially the same as those in “The American Scholar” address, but in the halls of the Divinity School they were much more controversial. He urged the newly appointed ministers to preach from their own experience: “Be to [your congregation] a divine man; be to them thought and virtue... let their doubts know that you have doubted, and their wonder feel that you have wondered” (p. 79). In order to do this, though, he declared, the ministers must forget the “historical Christianity” they had been taught, and unlearn the formal methods of scriptural interpretation in which they had been trained—a method Emerson claimed was responsible for “the universal decay and now almost death of faith in society” (p. 74). Although some in attendance were greatly inspired, others were outraged, especially those faculty members whose methodology was dismissed as damaging to true religious faith. Five weeks after the talk, Andrews Norton, a distinguished professor of theology at Harvard, published a newspaper article condemning Emerson’s address as “an incoherent rhapsody” and “an insult to religion,” the words of an atheist. Emerson’s supporters rushed to his defense, but he refused to take part in the public controversy. He set about his work, and the lessons he learned by his public censure eventually found their way into “Self-Reliance,” his most defiant—but also most pragmatic—account of the constraints of conformity.

The public reaction to his Divinity School address may have confirmed Emerson in his decision to give up preaching in favor of the lecture circuit, which was proving to be more lucrative. In January 1839 he delivered his final sermon and committed himself to the work of compiling an edition of essays from his numerous lectures and journal entries. However, it would take him another two years to decide on a suitable arrangement and to revise and rework the material he published in 1841 as Essays. During this time he continued to lecture regularly, and he assisted Margaret Fuller as co-editor of the Dial. He also continued to manage the publication of Carlyle’s writings in America, a task he had begun in 1836 when he arranged and wrote the introduction for an American edition of Sartor Resartus. Emerson also edited a collection of essays and poems by Jones Very, a young man struck with such religious enthusiasm that for a time he believed himself a literal incarnation of the Holy Spirit. While he sometimes complained that these other publishing ventures were a distraction from his own writing, their success helped spur him to complete his own volume of essays.

Essays was published during a time of political intensity and social transformation. The generation Emerson had addressed in “The American Scholar” was coming of age. The belief was widespread that the fundamental structures of society could and would be changed. Abolition, women’s suffrage, the rights of labor, the temperance movement, and the establishment of numerous communes committed to socialist principles of shared labor—all indicated that large portions of the population were committed to social reform. Yet even as he was being recognized as a leading voice among the transcendentalists, Emerson held himself aloof from direct involvement in many of their projects of re form. He refused to join Brook Farm, the utopian commune founded by George Ripley, and though he did speak out against slavery on several occasions, he was hesitant to associate himself with abolitionist organizations or their publications. He stated his reasons publicly in an address to the Mechanics’ Apprentices Association titled “Man the Reformer,” delivered on January 25,1841, just a few weeks after he sent Essays to press. “The power, which is at once spring and regulator in all efforts of reform, is the conviction that there is an infinite worthiness in man which will appear at the call of worth” (p. 93). From Emerson’s perspective, in order for social reform to be effective, it must necessarily be preceded by self-reform. Essays was Emerson’s contribution to the reform movement insofar as each essay in the series was meant to liberate the reader from conventional ways of knowing and turn him back on his own inner resources. “A greater self-reliance,” Emerson declared in the essay of that name, “... must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; in their speculative views” (p. 129). Emerson imagined the self-reliant individual as engaged in an ongoing process of self-becoming. “Every man believes that he has a greater possibility” (p.