Publisher Description
The American Scholar was a speech given by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1837, to the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College. Emerson argues that American culture, still heavily influenced by Europe, could build a new, distinctly American cultural identity. Emerson uses Transcendentalist and Romantic points of view to explain a true American scholar’s relationship to nature. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. declared this speech to be America’s Intellectual Declaration of Independence. Building on the growing attention he was receiving from the essay Nature, this speech solidified Emerson’s popularity and weight in America.
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About Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) was a renowned lecturer and writer whose ideas on philosophy, religion, and literature influenced many writers, including Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. After an undergraduate career at Harvard, he studied at Harvard Divinity School and became an ordained minister. He led the transcendentalist movement in America in the mid-nineteenth century. He is perhaps most well known for his publications Essays and Nature.
About Phil Paonessa
James Anderson Foster, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, has narrated audiobooks for a variety of publishers, across nearly all genres, both fiction and nonfiction. In 2015, he was a finalist in three categories for the Society of Voice Arts and Sciences Voice Arts Awards—mystery, science fiction, and fantasy.