Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Marcus, James

ISBN 10: 0691254338 / ISBN 13: 9780691254333

Published by Princeton University Press, 2024

About this Item

First Edition. 1st edition, 1st printing with complete number line. Hardcover with very good dust-jacket. Clean and solid. No tears, stains, or odors. NOT a book club edition. NOT ex-library. Hand-wrapped and packaged in cardboard.

Seller Inventory # mon0000015606

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691254338
• ISBN 13: 9780691254333
• Binding: hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

An engaging reassessment of the celebrated essayist and his relevance to contemporary readers

More than two centuries after his birth, Ralph Waldo Emerson remains one of the presiding spirits in American culture. Yet his reputation as the starry-eyed prophet of self-reliance has obscured a much more complicated figure who spent a lifetime wrestling with injustice, philosophy, art, desire, and suffering. James Marcus introduces readers to this Emerson, a writer of self-interrogating genius whose visionary flights are always grounded in Yankee shrewdness.

This Emerson is a rebel. He is also a lover, a friend, a husband, and a father. Having declared his great topic to be “the infinitude of the private man,” he is nonetheless an intensely social being who develops Transcendentalism in the company of Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and Theodore Parker. And although he resists political activism early on—hoping instead for a revolution in consciousness—the burning issue of slavery ultimately transforms him from cloistered metaphysician to fiery abolitionist.

Drawing on telling episodes from Emerson’s life alongside landmark essays like “Self-Reliance,” “Experience,” and “Circles,” Glad to the Brink of Fear reveals how Emerson shares our preoccupations with fate and freedom, race and inequality, love and grief. It shows, too, how his desire to see the world afresh, rather than accepting the consensus view, is a lesson that never grows old.

About the Author

James Marcus is an editor, translator, and critic who has written and lectured widely on Emerson. His essays and criticism have appeared in leading publications such as The New Yorker, the Times Literary Supplement, and Harper’s Magazine. He is the author of Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.com Juggernaut.