Essays: First Series

Twelve essays by the American thinker who taught his readers to trust themselves. Self-Reliance, the most famous, urges every person to believe his own thought, to resist conformity and to remember that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds; Compensation argues that every gain is paid for and every loss repaid; and the others take up history, friendship, love, prudence, heroism, the soul, art and the circles in which thought keeps widening. The sentences are short, quotable and meant to provoke.

Emerson, a former minister in Boston who became the centre of the Transcendentalist movement, published this collection in 1841, and its influence runs through American writing from Thoreau, whose Walden is in this library, onwards. Seven LibriVox volunteers read it in about eight and a half hours.