Authors Like Ralph Waldo Emerson

Michel de Montaigne

French · Essays (1580; enlarged 1588)

Montaigne (1533–1592) was a magistrate in Bordeaux who withdrew to his family estate in 1571 to read and write. His Essais — the word means attempts — test ideas about friendship, cruelty, education and death against his own experience; the first two books appeared in 1580 and a third in 1588. Emerson made him the sceptic in Representative Men (1850).

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Thomas Carlyle

Scottish · Sartor Resartus (1833–34), The French Revolution (1837), On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841)

Carlyle (1795–1881) was born in Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire. Sartor Resartus, a strange philosophical novel about an imaginary German professor and his philosophy of clothes, was serialised in Fraser’s Magazine in 1833–34; its first book edition appeared in Boston in 1836, arranged by Emerson, who corresponded with him until Carlyle’s death. Readers should know that his 1849 “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” is openly racist.

Henry David Thoreau

American · “Civil Disobedience” (1849), Walden (1854)

Thoreau (1817–1862) was born in Concord and became Emerson’s protégé, living for a time in his household. From July 1845 to September 1847 he lived in a cabin he built on land Emerson owned beside Walden Pond, the experiment behind Walden. A night in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax, in protest against slavery and the Mexican–American War, led to “Civil Disobedience”. Emerson gave the eulogy at his funeral.

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Margaret Fuller

American · Summer on the Lakes (1844), Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)

Fuller (1810–1850) led paid ‘conversations’ for Boston women and was the first editor of The Dial, the Transcendentalist magazine. Woman in the Nineteenth Century, expanded from an essay in The Dial, argued that women needed the same freedom to develop as men. She became a foreign correspondent for the New-York Tribune and reported from Rome during the revolution of 1848–49; she drowned with her husband and son when their ship was wrecked off Fire Island in 1850.

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Walt Whitman

American · Leaves of Grass (1855; expanded until 1892)

Whitman (1819–1892) was a Brooklyn printer and journalist when he self-published the first Leaves of Grass in 1855. Emerson wrote to him, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career”, and Whitman printed the line on the second edition without asking, which Emerson disliked. He kept enlarging the book for the rest of his life.

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Emily Dickinson

American · Poems (1890), The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955)

Dickinson (1830–1886) wrote nearly 1,800 poems in Amherst, Massachusetts, and saw fewer than a dozen published in her lifetime. As a young woman she was given Emerson’s Poems (1847) by Benjamin Franklin Newton, a law student in her father’s office. Thomas H. Johnson’s 1955 edition was the first to print her poems close to how she wrote them.

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Herman Melville

American · Moby-Dick (1851), The Confidence-Man (1857)

Melville (1819–1891) went to sea as a young man and turned his voyages into his first books. After encountering Emerson in 1849 he wrote of a ‘defect in the region of the heart’ in him, though he later called him a great man. In The Confidence-Man, set on a Mississippi steamboat on April Fool’s Day, the cool philosopher Mark Winsome is a caricature of Emerson and his ‘practical disciple’ Egbert of Thoreau.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

German · The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85), Beyond Good and Evil (1886)

Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a classical philologist turned philosopher who stopped working after a mental collapse in 1889. He read Emerson closely and regarded him as the most gifted of the Americans. After his death his sister Elisabeth controlled his papers and later tied his name to the Nazis, a distortion scholars have since corrected.

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Mary Oliver

American · American Primitive (1983), New and Selected Poems (1992), Devotions (2017)

Oliver (1935–2019) was born in Ohio and spent much of her life in Provincetown, Massachusetts, walking the woods and shoreline she wrote about. American Primitive won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and New and Selected Poems the National Book Award. She wrote the introduction to the Modern Library’s The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (2000).

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Annie Dillard

American · Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), Holy the Firm (1977), The Writing Life (1989)

Dillard was born in Pittsburgh in 1945. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a year of close observation in a valley in Virginia’s Blue Ridge, won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1975. Holy the Firm asks how a good God can allow suffering, prompted by a child badly burned in a plane crash.

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