Scholarly infighting can get a lot more violent than most outsiders realize, but most of the time, that violence is confined to the printed page. Not so in Concord, Mass., where the arrival of Homer Kelly, a well known expert on the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, has stirred up passions concerning a manuscript that may or may not have been written by Henry David Thoreau, one of Emerson's colleagues. Things come to a head during the town's annual re-enactment...

In this engaging biography, Firkins provides a comprehensive account of Emerson's life and a scholarly review of his writings. A narrative filled with colorful excerpts from Emerson's letters, journals, and other writings, as well as anecdotes from Emerson's family and friends, this work brings to life a leading figure of American thought.

The America we know today is so different in its fundamental views about almost every aspect of life as to be unrecognizable to our countrymen of two centuries ago. On issues as divergent as slavery, women's rights, education, the environment, and many others, we are simply no longer the country we were. What is the source of not only these changes, but of our distinctly American way of experiencing ourselves-confident in our value as individuals,...

From the start of transcendentalism and America's intellectual renaissance in the 1830s, to the Civil War and beyond, the story of four extraordinary friends whose lives shaped a nation. Beginning in the 1830s, coincidences that seem almost miraculous in retrospect brought together in Concord as friends and neighbors four men of very different temperaments and talents who shared the same conviction that the soul had 'inherent power to grasp the truth'...

"To coincide with the bicentennial of Thoreau's birth in 2017, this...biography by naturalist and historian Kevin Dann fills a gap in our understanding of one modern history's most important spiritual visionaries by capturing the full arc of Thoreau's life as a mystic, spiritual seeker, and explorer in transcendental realms."--