Har vard University names him an Overseer of the Corporation.

 1868  Louisa May Alcott publishes Little Women.  Emerson’s brother William dies in New York City.
 1870 Society and Solitude  is published. This year and the next Emer son presents at Harvard the lecture series “The Natural History of the Intellect.”
 1871  Emerson travels to California by railroad at the urging of his son-in-law, who works in the railroad industry. 
 1872- 1873  Fire destroys Emerson’s home. During its reconstruction a dev astated Emerson and his daughter Ellen travel to Europe and Egypt. He visits Carlyle for the last time. 
 1874 Parnassus,  an anthology of favorite poems Emerson compiled throughout his lifetime, appears.
 1875  James Elliot Cabot, Emerson’s literary executor and future bi ographer, compiles and publishes Letters  and Social Aims, the last book by Emerson to be published in his lifetime.
 1876- 1881  Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer appears in 1876. Emerson stops making entries to his journal as his mental fac ulties slowly decline. Henry James’s The American, Daisy Miller, and Hawthorne  appear.
 1882  Barely able to speak, Emerson attends the funeral of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Ralph Waldo Emerson dies on April 27 and is buried at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord. 

Introduction

Optimist and Realist

Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the most influential American writers of the nineteenth century. His essays, lectures, and poems significantly shaped the cultural values and intellectual traditions that remain central to our understanding of American culture. He inspired a poetic tradition that has passed down from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams. He anticipated a pragmatic style of thinking that has influenced American philosophers from William James to John Dewey to Richard Rorty. He was a leading figure among the transcendentalists, a group of writers, intellectuals, and social reformers whose ideas helped transform American culture during the period of rapid industrial growth and westward expansion that occurred from 1830 to 1860. Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Theodore Parker, and Nathaniel Hawthorne are just a few of the contemporary writers who were inspired and antagonized by Emerson’s words and example. His philosophy of self-reliance, his optimistic faith in the progress of American civilization, and his insistence on each individual’s capacity for greatness continue to inspire new generations of writers, intellectuals, artists, and entrepreneurs. His essays, especially, offer readers an opportunity to engage in conscious acts of self-reflection modeled after his own contemplative engagement with the natural world. For Emerson, to enter into nature meant to enter an environment, free from society’s conventional attitudes and opinions, where one could discover one’s self, unique and apart from all other relations. “In the woods, we return to reason and faith,” he wrote in Nature. “There I feel that nothing can befall me in life ... which nature cannot repair” (p. 12). A similar experience may be had by those who enter into Emerson’s essays. Often written in an elliptical style, and punctuated with epigrammatic statements such as “That is always best which gives me to myself” (p. 73) and “Insist on yourself; never imitate” (p. 132), Emerson’s essays regularly turn readers back on themselves, reminding us that it is not in his writings, but in ourselves that we will find the purpose and motivation that defines our lives.

The appeal of Emerson’s writings, however, has as much to do with their radicalism as with their affirmation of the individual. He maintained that if we would but trust ourselves, we would discover unlimited resources for the accomplishment of our will, but this belief was inseparable from his equally strong conviction that the opinions of the majority in American society lead away from self-trust and into conformity. “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members,” he wrote famously in “Self-Reliance.” “Society is a joint stock company in which the members agree for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity.... Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist” (p. 116). Yet Emerson was not simply calling his readers to be iconoclastic. He knew that he lived in a time of unprecedented political change, one that gave, as he wrote in “The American Scholar,” “new importance ... to the single person” (p.