"This 'biography in letters' supplements the traditional biographical narrative with letters taken from a vast body of correspondence, resulting in a study that refuses to single out the life and work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, providing instead a portrait of an illustrious nineteenth-century family."--
American Literature"Combining exacting editing skills with balanced historical judgment, Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson have produced another distinguished volume based on the extraordinarily rich outpouring of Emerson and his circle.... In
The Emerson Brothers, the specialist will discover much that is new, and the nonspecialist will certainly appreciate scholarship that is graceful and reflective of the time before critical theory and polemical rhetoric began dominating narrative. The authors have performed yet another vital service to transcendental studies."--Kenneth S. Sacks,
The New England Quarterly"We know the Emerson of the poems, essays, and journals, but the letters published in this biography for the first time present not only a man with a different voice, but also a mind creating itself through the epistolary form.... These fascinating letters include not only correspondence among the brothers but also between them and their formidable aunt, Mary Moody Emerson (Waldo called her a genius), their mother, the much beloved Ruth Haskins Emerson, and Charles's fiancee, Elizabeth Hoar.... Emerson discovered a personal appeal in the moral value of a life, played out against one's obligations to the past and present, to the family, and to the self.... Ronald Bosco and Joel Myerson are to be commended for reviving that singular sense of majesty. Their book presents not only a novel way of reintegrating Emerson into the world out of which he arose, but also an inspiring evocation of biography itself as the way to illuminate the secret sanctuary of the self."--
The New York Sun"Through this epistolary biography one glimpses for the first time one of America's great intellectual families, which can be ranked alongside the Adams, Lowells, and James families. This collection of more than 1,200 unpublished letters exchanged among the four Emerson brothers and a few other family members reveals 19th-century America through the eyes of a cultured, intelligent, self-conscious group of people who shared a unique heritage and set of values.... Bosco and Myerson intersperse among the quoted letters a rich analytical narrative.... Essential." --
Choice"This volume of hitherto unpublished letters takes us to the heart of nineteenth-century American intellectual history and illuminates as never before the family relationships that produced the extraordinary Ralph Waldo Emerson. Although seemingly the American individual personified, in large measure the sage of Concord became such through interaction with his extraordinary siblings.
The Emerson Brothers reveals as never before what it meant to be a part of one of America's first families."--Philip F. Gura, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
"The author's fundamental thesis, that a family culture formed Ralph Waldo Emerson's work, is a valuable corrective to generations of interest in his engagement only with traditional literary and philosophical sources. This 'fraternal biography' reveals Waldo's inner life in a fresh, relational way."--Phyllis Cole, author of
Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Trancendentalism"Original, exciting scholarship by two accomplished, pioneering critics and editors."--William E. Cain, Mary Jewett Gaiser Professor of English, Wellesley College