Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures (LOA #15): Nature; Addresses, and Lectures / Essays: First and Second Series / Representative Men / English Traits / The Conduct of Life

Our most eloquent champion of individualism, Emerson acknowledges at the same time the countervailing pressures of society in American life. Even as he extols what he called “the great and crescive self,” he dramatizes and records its vicissitudes.

Here are all the indispensable and most renowned works, including “The American Scholar” (“our intellectual Declaration of Independence,” as Oliver Wendell Holmes called it), “The Divinity School Address,” considered atheistic by many of his list...