| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Kenneth S. Sacks. Understanding Emerson: "The American Scholar" and His Struggle for Self-Reliance. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2003. Pp. xii, 199. $29.95.

An adequate account of the historical origins of Ralph Waldo Emerson's delivery in 1837 of the Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard, a speech that eventually became know as "The American Scholar," must tie together a complicated variety of personalities, institutions, and events. These run from the Unitarian cabal in control of Harvard and the Transcendentalist dissenters (especially Bronson Alcott), on through the emerging lyceum circuit and the nation's rapidly expanding literary marketplace, and then into Emerson's voluminous journals and private correspondence. Kenneth S. Sacks's carefully researched new study attempts to make sense of the story by dividing it neatly into two parts. The first focuses on the "public Emerson," explaining "the revolutionary intent of the oration, as Emerson turned his back on tradition and offered an entirely new understanding of what it meant to be an American scholar." The second, which attracts most of his attention, explores the "private Emerson," reconstructing his mental state in the summer of 1837, explaining how he received an unexpected invitation to deliver the address and then struggled with "almost pedestrian feelings of inadequacy" to become the very scholar he proposed to his audience (p. 3–4).

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