Ralph Waldo Emerson
A Bicentennial Exhibition at Houghton Library of the Harvard College Library
Ronald A. Bosco
Joel Myerson
Houghton Library celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of Ralph Waldo Emerson with an exhibition of the library's unparalleled collection of Emersoniana. Edited by exhibition curators Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson, long acknowledged as the deans of Emerson scholarship, this catalogue explores Emerson's extensive journals, his correspondence with such Transcendalist luminaries as Bronson Alcott and Margaret Fuller, his stormy friendship with Henry David Thoreau, and the role he played as patriarch to a vast and fractious extended family of poets, thinkers, abolitionists, and cranks at the heart of the American Renaissance. Through copious illustration and sparkling narrative, this catalogue documents Emerson's prodigious output as essayist, poet, and lecturer, and chronicles the intense joys and tragic losses of the Sage of Concord. A visual, intellectual, and literary feast, Ralph Waldo Emerson will appeal not only to scholars of Emerson and students of American literature, but to all those fascinated by Emerson and his world.
Ronald A. Bosco, Distinguished Professor of English and American Literature, State University of New York at Albany, is General Editor of the Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Joel Myerson is Carolina Distinguished Professor of American Literature at University of South Carolina, Columbia.