Essays — First Series

Emerson's Essays, First Series (1841) is the founding book of American philosophical literature. Twelve essays — History, Self-Reliance, Compensation, Spiritual Laws, Love, Friendship, Prudence, Heroism, The Over-Soul, Circles, Intellect, Art — drawn from the lectures Emerson had been delivering through New England in the late 1830s. Self-Reliance sits at its centre.

That central essay became, within Emerson's own lifetime, one of the most influential pieces of American prose ever written. Its insistence that the trustworthy authority is the individual soul, that imitation is suicide, and that to be great is to be misunderstood — these claims have remained the bedrock of the American moral imagination for nearly two centuries, shaping Thoreau, Whitman, William James, Nietzsche (who read Emerson devotedly), and the long line of American writers who followed.