Representative Men is Ralph Waldo Emerson's collection of essays on exemplary figures and the forms of power they represent. By writing about Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Goethe, Emerson asks how genius works, how influence moves through history, and how great individuals embody capacities that also belong, in smaller form, to all people.
The book is less conventional biography than philosophical portraiture. Emerson is interested in mind, style, moral force, imagination, action, and cultural authority. His judgments can be sweeping, but they reveal his belief that reading great lives can enlarge one's own. Readers interested in Transcendentalism, biography as philosophy, literary influence, intellectual character, and nineteenth-century American essays will find a thoughtful and ambitious work.
No posts about this book yet. Be the first in the app!
