Robert D. Habich's Books

Building Their Own Waldos

Emerson’s First Biographers and the Politics of Life-Writing in the Gilded Age

By: Robert D. Habich

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Building Their Own Waldos

Emerson’s First Biographers and the Politics of Life-Writing in the Gilded Age

By: Robert D. Habich

By the end of the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson was well on his way to becoming the “Wisest American” and the “Sage of Concord,” a literary celebrity and a national icon. With that fame came what Robert Habich describes as a blandly sanctified version of Emerson held widely by the reading public. Building Their Own Waldos sets out to understand the dilemma faced by Emerson’s early biographers: how to represent a figure whose subversive individualism had been eclipsed by his celebrity, making him less a representative of his age than a caricature of it. Drawing on never-before-published letters, diaries, drafts, business records, and private documents, Habich explores the making of a cultural hero through the stories of Emerson’s first biographers— George Willis Cooke, a minister most recently from Indianapolis who considered himself a disciple; the English reformer and newspaper mogul Alexander Ireland, a friend for half a century; Moncure D. Conway, a Southern abolitionist then residing in London, who called Emerson his “spiritual father and intellectual teacher”; the poet and medical professor Oliver Wendell Holmes, with Emerson a member of Boston’s gathering of literary elite, the Saturday Club; James Elliot Cabot, the family’s authorized biographer, an architect and amateur philosopher with unlimited access to Emerson’s unpublished papers; and Emerson’s son Edward, a physician and painter whose father had passed over him as literary executor in favor of Cabot. Just as their biographies reveal a complex, socially engaged Emerson, so too do the biographers’ own stories illustrate the real-world perils, challenges, and motives of life-writing in the late nineteenth century, when biographers were routinely vilified as ghoulish and disreputable and biography as a genre underwent a profound redefinition. Building Their Own Waldos is at once a revealing look at Emerson’s constructed reputation, a case study in the rewards and dangers of Victorian life-writing, and the story of six authors struggling amidst personal misfortunes and shifting expectations to capture the elusive character of America’s “representative man,” as they knew him and as they needed him to be.

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Page Count

217

Publisher

University of Iowa Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1587299631

ISBN 13

9781587299636

Building Their Own Waldos

Emerson’s First Biographers and the Politics of Life-Writing in the Gilded Age

By: Robert D. Habich

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Building Their Own Waldos

Emerson’s First Biographers and the Politics of Life-Writing in the Gilded Age

By: Robert D. Habich

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

217

Publisher

University of Iowa Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1587299631

ISBN 13

9781587299636

Lives Out of Letters

Essays on American Literary Biography and Documentation in Honor of Robert N. Hudspeth

By: Robert N. Hudspeth

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Lives Out of Letters

Essays on American Literary Biography and Documentation in Honor of Robert N. Hudspeth

By: Robert N. Hudspeth

Though the efficacy of literary biography has been widely contested by academic theorists, artention to the lives of authors remains an enduring fact of our literary history. Dedicated to Robert N. Hudspeth, editor of the Letters of Margaret Fuller and the Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, the eleven essays in this collection address from a practitioner's perspective the relationship between American literary biography, documentation, and interpretation.

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Page Count

292

Publisher

Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0838640052

ISBN 13

9780838640050

Book's by Robert D. Habich

Building Their Own Waldos

Building Their Own Waldos

Building Their Own Waldos

Building Their Own Waldos

Lives Out of Letters

Lives Out of Letters

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