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Understanding Emerson: "The American Scholar" and His Struggle for Self-Reliance. By Kenneth S. Sacks. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. xiv, 199 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-691-09982-0.)
Emerson's Life in Science: The Culture of Truth. By Laura Dassow Walls. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. x, 280 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-8014-4044-0.)
These two books offer contrasting approaches to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Kenneth S. Sacks focuses on one event, Emerson's 1837 address at Harvard, "The American Scholar," giving us its text and showing us its historical and personal contexts: controversy among the Unitarians, curricular disputes at Harvard, and Emerson's relations with his family and friends. Laura Dassow Walls, in contrast, surveys Emerson's entire career, from his earliest journals to his latest writing, all with the aim of tracing and understanding his interest in science.
Sacks adds significantly to our understanding of "The American Scholar" by showing just how radical an address it was. The phrase "American scholar" had been used before in graduation addresses, in which speakers were expected both to defer to the American literary establishment and to call for an American scholarship and literature matching Europe's. Emerson did neither of these things. He complained that the scholars of the time were '"bibliomaniacs'" and '"bookworm[s]!" (p. 135) rather than independent thinkers, and he called for a universal rather than a peculiarly American scholar. Sacks is particularly good at showing how Emerson's language in the address, which was punctuated by short vernacular jolts, was...