Volume 28, Number 21 & 22 · January 21, 1982
The Father of Us All
By Alfred Kazin
Waldo Emerson: A Biography
by Gay Wilson Allen
Viking, 751 pp., $25.00
No other American writer has had Emerson's pervasive (and for many people hateful) influence on America and its writers. Yet there is no satisfactory book on Emerson's mind itself and his relation to the romantic, bourgeois, 'progressive' sense of individual power that became the stock gospel of the nineteenth century. Nietzsche recognized in him a fellow heretic on the mountaintops of the Übermensch; Carlyle, for all his hatred of American democracy, excepted Emerson from his usual tirades; Arnold, George Eliot, and of course Whitman, Thoreau, William James, Justice Holmes, all associated themselves with what Emerson exuded (even on the lecture platform) as an exceptionality that he meant to impart to everyone.
Review, 1879 words
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