Ralph Waldo Emerson is perhaps the most influential and pivotal figure in American literary history. As a writer he was a major nineteenth-century craftsman of American cultural identity. Emerson brought about an awareness of what it could mean to be an American, as distinct from being a colonial subject of the British Empire. While his philosophical notions may blur into common themes of the American Romantic period, the parallel between his mature philosophical thought and the emergence of the American republic stands out. His early life reveals a struggle to achieve an identity of his own and to seal it with an appropriate vocational commitment; few significant models were available to guide him. Emerson's personal struggle has a parallel in the struggle of American institutional and cultural life to become autonomous on the world scene. His mature philosophical writings, most of which appeared in the 1850s, reflect thematic...