Essays: First Series
The first series includes Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, Circles and Compensation, and it is the book that gave American literature a philosophy of its own. Emerson writes in paragraphs that can be quoted without context, which is both his strength and his weakness.
He is not a systematic thinker, and readers looking for an argument will be frustrated. What he offers instead is a series of provocations: trust yourself, distrust consistency, treat books as instruments rather than authorities. Some of it is naive; some of it is still useful.
Public-domain status
First published in 1841. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Ralph Waldo Emerson died in 1882, so this work has been free to republish there since 1953.
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- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 2944 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
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Keep reading
- Walden — Henry David Thoreau, 1854
- Nature — Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1836
- The Souls of Black Folk — W. E. B. Du Bois, 1903
- Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen, 1813
- Concord — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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