| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Making of a Democratic Intellectual. By Peter S. Field. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. xvi, 255 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-8476-8842-9.)

Had Peter S. Field completed this book on the model of its first half, we might have the good short biography that students of Ralph Waldo Emerson still need. But as soon as the narrative arrives at 1836 and the beginning of Emerson's publishing career, the author shifts gears and offers topical chapters on Emerson the lecturer and Emerson the "reluctant abolitionist" and a capstone survey of Emerson the democratic intellectual. Each segment has an independent value, but, as the upshot of specific decisions about what to say and what not to say, the study joins a gathering tradition in Emerson studies that subordinates the writer and his texts to the cultural mechanisms that sustained the career. Joel Porte pioneered that emphasis twenty years ago in Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time (1979) by paying special attention to the early journals, and it has since been continued in studies by Evelyn Barish and Mary Kupiec Cayton. As in Field's book, so in this larger critical trend, the middle term tends to drop out as we ask how, before the fact, American social conditions licensed such a career and how, after the fact, the career reacted on American society—not forgetting to inquire, in all this attention to the career, how much money Emerson made between times.

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