“Robert Richardson has done exquisite service both to Emerson and to the many readers this book will surely attract and leave with a deeper understanding of Emerson the writer. How many of us have read through all the journals to gather his thoughts, often private, uncontained in the essays, about the actual work of turning language into the fertile body of expressed thought? As in his biography of Emerson, The Mind on Fire, we are recipients again of Richardson’s scholarship, his unflagging, inquisitive, humanist unveiling of the great Emerson’s thoughts.” —Mary Oliver (The Truro Bear)
“Richardson is Emerson’s foremost biographer, and he has culled the great man’s work for the kind of specific, timeless instruction that makes the difference between good writing and great writing. This is the book on writing that Emerson would have used to teach his lucky students. The chapter on sentences sparkles, and it alone is worth the purchase. Everyone who wants to learn about writing should read this book.” —Susan Cheever (American Bloomsbury)
“Robert Richardson’s extraordinary knowledge of Emerson’s life and work allows him to stroll back through the marginal notes to Emerson’s complete oeuvre and distill for us the choicest liquor. Most remarkable is the volume’s organization. Such a compilation and meditation becomes virtually a new interpretive essay about Emerson as reader and writer. Richardson’s pithy prose is as engaging as the master’s. We have here something that, from its first page, will instantly delight and instruct both readers and writers. This should be a favorite among all sorts of readers: creative writers who will turn to it to see what a master thought about language and its manifold uses; prose writers who will see in Emerson’s essays timeless models for their own work; poets who will learn much about words and their fitness for the various works to which we seek to put them.” —Philip F. Gura (American Transcendentalism: A History)
Robert D. Richardson is the author of William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, which won the 2007 Bancroft Prize, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, which won both the Francis Parkman Prize and the Melcher Book Award and was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, which also won the Melcher Book Award.
