The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

EMERSON, Ralph Waldo FIRKINS.

Item Number: 98988

Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903-1915.

The Centenary edition of the works of Emerson. Octavo, 13 volumes, bound in three quarters contemporary morocco over cloth, elaborately gilt-decorated spines, raised bands, top edge gilt, marbled endpapers. Photogravure portrait frontispiece to various titles. With the O.W. Firkins biography on Emerson. In very good condition.

When Emerson died in 1882 he was the most famous public intellectual in America. This edition of the Complete Works includes all of Emerson’s poems, lectures, biographical sketches, letters, and his famous essays, several of which are here printed for the first time. Their "ethical inspiration and stimulation, their occasional startling phrase, their individualistic idealism, which stirred renascent Yankee New England to its depths, speaks with the same simple power and force in the midst of modern complexities" (Grolier, American 100 47).