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Emerson's Protégés: Mentoring and Marketing Transcendentalism's Future

Online ISBN:
9780300206760
Print ISBN:
9780300197440
Publisher:
Yale University Press
Book

Emerson's Protégés: Mentoring and Marketing Transcendentalism's Future

David Dowling
David Dowling
University of Iowa's School of Journalism and Mass Communication
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Published:
26 August 2014
Online ISBN:
9780300206760
Print ISBN:
9780300197440
Publisher:
Yale University Press

Abstract

In the late 1830s, Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist, poet, lecturer, and leader of the Transcendentalist movement, publicly called for a radical nationwide vocational reinvention, and an idealistic group of collegians eagerly responded. Assuming the role of mentor, editor, and promoter, Emerson freely offered them his time, financial support, and antimaterialistic counsel, and profoundly shaped the careers of his young acolytes—including Henry David Thoreau, renowned journalist and women's rights advocate Margaret Fuller, and lesser-known literary figures such as Samuel Ward and reckless romantic poets Jones Very, Ellery Channing, and Charles Newcomb. This book's history of the professional and personal relationships between Emerson and his protégés—a remarkable collaboration that alternately proved fruitful and destructive, tension-filled and liberating—is a fascinating true story of altruism, ego, influence, pettiness, genius, and the bold attempt to reshape the literary market of the mid-nineteenth century.

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