Emerson in His Journals [Paperback]

This long-awaited volume offers the general reader the heart of Emersons journals, that extraordinary series of diaries and notebooks in which he poured out his thoughts for more than fifty years, beginning with the luckless ragamuffin ideas of his college days.

Emerson as revealed in his journals is more spontaneous, more complex, more human and appealing than he appears in the published works. This man is the seeker rather than the sage; he records the turmoil, struggle, and questioning that preceded the serene and confident affirmations of the essays. He is honest, earthy, tough-minded, self-critical (I am a lover of indolence, & of the belly), warm in his enthusiasms, a witty and sharp observer of people and events. Everything is grist for his mill: personal experiences, his omnivorous reading, ruminations on matters large and small, his doubts and perplexities, public issues and local gossip. There are abrupt shifts in subject and tone, reflecting the variousness of his moods and the restless energy of his mind.

Drawing from Harvards sixteen-volume scholarly edition of the journalsbut omitting the textual apparatus that makes it hard to readJoel Porte presents a sympathetic selection that brings us close to Emerson the man.

Its cause for celebration that a one-volume, thoroughly readable selection from this American classic, keenly alive to modern taste, makes its appearance. It is a volume that every serious reader or lover of American literature will want& Emerson in His Journals, a book to own and cherish, is the best of companions.[The editor] has performed an invaluable service by condensing the Harvard edition of Emersons journals into a single volume& The man who appears in these pages is not just a sunny optimist, living serenely in rustic Concord, Mass. This Emerson also dwells in an age of cholera, slavery, and Civil War. Beyond his back pasture stands the town poor-house, where a madwoman screams night and day&his daily l#0