Ralph Waldo Emerson Journals.

EMERSON, Ralph Waldo.

Item Number: 4465

Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1903.

Octavo, 8 volumes. Number 56 of 600. Three quarters morocco, gilt tooling to the spine, front and rear panels. Top edge gilt, marbled endpapers.

When Emerson died in 1882 he was the most famous public intellectual in America. Yet his most remarkable literary creation—his journals—remained unpublished. Begun when he was a precocious Harvard junior of 16 and continued without significant lapse for almost 60 years, Emerson’s journals were his life’s work. They were the starting point for virtually everything in his celebrated essays, lectures, and poems; a "Savings Bank," in which his occasional insights began to cohere and yield interest; a commonplace book, in which he gathered the choicest anecdotes, ideas, and phrases from his voracious and wide-ranging reading; and a fascinating diary in the ordinary sense of the term.