Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures (Nature; Addresses, and Lectures, Essays: First and Second Series, Representative Men, English Traits, The Conduct of Life) (Library of America)

This first Library of America volume of Emerson’s writing covers the most productive period of his life, 1832–1860. Our most eloquent champion of individualism, Emerson acknowledges at the same time the countervailing pressures of society in American life. Even as he extols what he called “the great and crescive self,” he dramatizes and records its vicissitudes.

Here are the indispensable and most renowned works, including “The American Scholar” (“our intellectual Declaration of Indepen…