This 1860 collection, based on Emerson’s lectures, contains classic essays on broad topics such as 'Fate, ’ 'Power, ’ 'Wealth, ’ 'Culture, ’ and 'Worship, ’ among others. Printed in the year Lincoln became President, it probes questions of the necessary conditions for human life and freedom. Emerson’s friend, the great English historian Thomas Carlyle, wrote of this book, 'I never read from you such lightning-gleams of meaning as are to be found here.’
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Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was an American essayist and poet. Along with such figures as Henry Thoreau and Margaret Fuller, he was an originator and, through the magazine The Dial, popularizer of the Transcendentalist movement. In essays like 'Self-Reliance, ’ he championed a distinctly American brand of individualism.