Ralph Waldo Emerson

Representative men; seven lectures. By Ralph Waldo Emerson

Representative Men is a collection of seven lectures by Ralph Waldo Emerson, published as a book of essays in 1850. The first essay discusses the role played by "great men" in society, and the remaining six each extoll the virtues of one of six men deemed by Emerson to be great: Plato ("the Philosopher") Emanuel Swedenborg ("the Mystic") Michel de Montaigne ("the Skeptic") William Shakespeare ("the Poet") Napoleon ("the Man of the World") Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ("the Writer") See also On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History - a similar series of lectures given by Thomas Carlyle, Emerson's Scottish contemporary Parallel Lives - classic work by Ancient Greek biographer Plutarch, outlining the lives of elite individuals and the virtues they represented. Great Men of History - the popular theory of the 19th-century that history could be explained as the product of 'Great Men'. Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 - April 27, 1882), known professionally as Waldo Emerson, was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States. Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, "Nature". Following this ground-breaking work, he gave a speech entitled "The American Scholar" in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America's "Intellectual Declaration of Independence"