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In 1832 Ralph Waldo Emerson, then 29, resigned as minister of the Second Church in Boston because he could no longer administer communion as the church required. A year after his first wife’s death he sailed for Europe, met Thomas Carlyle, and came home to make a living as a lecturer instead, giving about 1,500 lectures over his life. His first book, Nature (1836), came out without his name on it. Out of the lectures and his journals grew the essays “Self-Reliance”, “The Over-Soul” and “Experience”, and a body of work that Thoreau, Whitman and Nietzsche all read closely. This guide covers his 11 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 11 key books · 1836–1876 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s best-known books are Essays: First Series (1841), which contains “Self-Reliance”, Nature (1836), Essays: Second Series (1844) and The Conduct of Life (1860). He published 11 books of his own in his lifetime. Start with Essays: First Series. Below are all 11 in order, where to find “The American Scholar”, and why Harvard stopped inviting him.
Where to Start with Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you want the essays everyone quotes
→ Essays: First Series (1841) — “Self-Reliance”, “Compensation” and “Circles”.
If you want the short book that began Transcendentalism
→ Nature (1836) — under a hundred pages, in eight short chapters.
If you want his most practical book
→ The Conduct of Life (1860) — essays on fate, power, wealth and culture.
If you want his famous speeches
→ Nature; Addresses, and Lectures (1849) — “The American Scholar” and the Divinity School Address.
11 Ralph Waldo Emerson Books, in Order
Nature
A short book in eight sections, from “Commodity” and “Beauty” to “Spirit” and “Prospects”, published by James Munroe in Boston in September 1836 without the author’s name. It argues that nature is a language through which the individual can meet the divine directly, without church or tradition, and it contains his image of becoming “a transparent eye-ball”. Reviews were mixed, but Thoreau read it as a Harvard senior, and it became the founding text of American Transcendentalism.
Essays: First Series
Twelve essays worked up from his lectures and journals: “History”, “Self-Reliance”, “Compensation”, “Spiritual Laws”, “Love”, “Friendship”, “Prudence”, “Heroism”, “The Over-Soul”, “Circles”, “Intellect” and “Art”. “Self-Reliance”, with its call to trust your own thought over conformity and consistency, is the most widely read thing he wrote. Published simply as Essays; it took the title First Series after the second volume appeared.
Essays: Second Series
Nine essays: “The Poet”, “Experience”, “Character”, “Manners”, “Gifts”, “Nature”, “Politics”, “Nominalist and Realist” and “New England Reformers”. “Experience” was written after his five-year-old son Waldo died of scarlet fever in January 1842, and contains the line “I grieve that grief can teach me nothing”. “The Poet” calls for an American poet who did not yet exist.
Poems
His first collection of verse, issued in London at the end of 1846 and in Boston with the date 1847. It opens with “The Sphinx” and includes “Each and All”, “The Problem”, “Uriel”, “Threnody”, his elegy for his son, and “Concord Hymn”, written for the dedication of the battle monument at Concord on 4 July 1837, with its line about the “shot heard round the world”.
Nature; Addresses, and Lectures
A reissue of Nature together with the public addresses of his early career. The best known are “The American Scholar”, his Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard of 31 August 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. later called the intellectual declaration of independence of American life, and the Divinity School Address of July 1838, which turned the Unitarian establishment against him.
Representative Men
Lectures on six figures, each standing for a type: Plato the philosopher, Swedenborg the mystic, Montaigne the sceptic, Shakespeare the poet, Napoleon the man of the world and Goethe the writer, introduced by an essay on “the uses of great men”. The book invites comparison with Carlyle’s lectures On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History.
English Traits
A portrait of England and the English, drawn from his first visit in 1833 and from his lecture tour of the British Isles in 1847–48, published in Boston by Phillips, Sampson. It moves from wealth, manners and religion to the universities and the press, and includes a chapter on visiting Stonehenge with Thomas Carlyle.
The Conduct of Life
Nine essays, each with a poem as epigraph: “Fate”, “Power”, “Wealth”, “Culture”, “Behavior”, “Worship”, “Considerations by the Way”, “Beauty” and “Illusions”, many first given as lectures to lyceum audiences in the growing towns of the Midwest. Published by Ticknor and Fields in December 1860. Carlyle called it the writer’s best book; it sold well and Nietzsche was among its readers.
May-Day and Other Pieces
His second book of poems, opening with the long title poem on the coming of spring. It collects “Brahma”, “Days”, “Voluntaries” and “Terminus”, his poem on growing old, and the “Boston Hymn”, which he read at the Boston Music Hall on 1 January 1863 to celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation.
Society and Solitude
Twelve essays on ordinary life: “Society and Solitude”, “Civilization”, “Art”, “Eloquence”, “Domestic Life”, “Farming”, “Works and Days”, “Books”, “Clubs”, “Courage”, “Success” and “Old Age”. “Books” gives his rules for what to read and what to leave alone.
Letters and Social Aims
His last collection of essays, among them “Poetry and Imagination” and “Quotation and Originality”. By then his memory was failing, and the book was assembled from his lectures with heavy help from his daughter Ellen and from James Elliot Cabot, who later became his literary executor and biographer.
In What Order to Read Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing in Emerson runs as a series, so you can read him by essay rather than by book. Publication order still shows a shape: the early books are the radical ones, about the self and the divine; from Representative Men on he turns to history, other nations and how to live with fate, money and age.
Most readers meet him through single essays. A good sequence is “Self-Reliance” and “Circles” from the first series, then “Experience” from the second, then Nature and “The American Scholar”. One-volume selections, such as the Library of America’s Essays and Lectures (1983), gather all of these.
A reading path
1. “Self-Reliance” in Essays: First Series (1841)
2. “Experience” in Essays: Second Series (1844)
3. Nature (1836)
4. Representative Men (1850)
5. The Conduct of Life (1860)
Everything Else Ralph Waldo Emerson Published
Beyond the 11 key books: 4 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Edited books
2
2 books · 1852–1875
- 1852Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossolico-edited after Fuller’s death in 1850
- 1875Parnassusan anthology of poems by other poets that he favoured
Published after his death
2
2 books · 1883–1909
- 1883The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emersonletters from 1834 to 1872
- 1909Journalsten volumes, 1909–1914
The years · 1803–1882
Quick facts about Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Known for
- He is known as the leading voice of American Transcendentalism and the essayist of self-reliance and nonconformity.
- 1803
- Born in Boston, Massachusetts
- 1838
- The Divinity School Address at Harvard
- 1882
- Dies in Concord
- Born
- 25 May 1803, Boston, Massachusetts; his father was a Unitarian minister
- Education
- Harvard College, 1821; then Harvard Divinity School
- Ministry
- Junior pastor of the Second Church, Boston, 1829–1832
- Married
- Ellen Tucker in 1829 (she died in 1831); Lidian Jackson in 1835
- Home
- Concord, Massachusetts, from 1835 until his death
- Lectures
- About 1,500 over his lifetime
- Died
- 27 April 1882, Concord, Massachusetts
The red mark is 1841: Essays: First Series, the book that contains “Self-Reliance”.
How Ralph Waldo Emerson Writes: The Sentence Comes First
Emerson built his books from his journals, which he kept from 1820 onwards. Material went from journal to lecture to essay, and was reworked at each stage, sometimes over years. That is why his essays are dense with sentences that stand on their own, and why they are so often quoted out of context.
He wrote for the lecture hall first. About 1,500 lectures, many to lyceum audiences across New England and later the Midwest, shaped the essays: they address the reader directly, argue by example and assertion rather than by step-by-step proof, and often contradict themselves on purpose. “Self-Reliance” defends exactly that: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
His subject throughout is the single person in direct relation to nature and to the divine, without church, tradition or borrowed opinion as go-between. Later books test that faith against fate, money, grief and old age. The influence ran wide: Thoreau built his cabin at Walden on Emerson’s land in 1845, Whitman called him master, and Nietzsche counted him among the most gifted of Americans.
Frequently asked questions about Ralph Waldo Emerson’s books
How many books has Ralph Waldo Emerson written?
He published 11 books of his own during his lifetime, all listed on this page, from Nature (1836) to Letters and Social Aims (1876): eight of essays and addresses, two of poems and one on England. He also co-edited the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852) and edited the anthology Parnassus (1875); his letters with Carlyle and his Journals appeared after his death.
What are Ralph Waldo Emerson’s books in order?
Nature (1836), Essays: First Series (1841), Essays: Second Series (1844), Poems (1847), Nature; Addresses, and Lectures (1849), Representative Men (1850), English Traits (1856), The Conduct of Life (1860), May-Day and Other Pieces (1867), Society and Solitude (1870) and Letters and Social Aims (1876).
Where should I start with Ralph Waldo Emerson?
With Essays: First Series (1841), and within it with “Self-Reliance”. If you want something even shorter, Nature (1836) is under a hundred pages and shows where his thinking began.
What is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s most famous work?
The essay “Self-Reliance”, in Essays: First Series (1841), with lines such as “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string” and “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”. Of his books, Nature (1836) is the most famous, as the founding text of American Transcendentalism.
Is Self-Reliance a book?
No, it is a single essay. It first appeared in Essays (1841), now called Essays: First Series. It is often printed on its own today, but Emerson never published it as a separate book.
Where can I find “The American Scholar”?
Emerson gave it as the Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard on 31 August 1837, and it was printed as a pamphlet the same year. In book form it is in Nature; Addresses, and Lectures (1849), together with the Divinity School Address.
Why was Ralph Waldo Emerson banned from Harvard?
Because of the Divinity School Address of 15 July 1838. Invited by the graduating class, he told them that belief in the miracles was not necessary and criticised the lifeless preaching of the churches. Andrews Norton attacked his ideas as “the latest form of infidelity” and Henry Ware Jr. answered in a sermon. Emerson was not invited back to speak at Harvard for about thirty years. Harvard gave him an honorary degree in 1866 and asked him to give the Phi Beta Kappa oration in 1867.
Was Ralph Waldo Emerson a Transcendentalist?
Yes, its central figure. He helped found the Transcendental Club in September 1836, the month Nature came out, and edited its journal, The Dial, from 1842 until it closed in 1844, after Margaret Fuller.
What was Emerson’s relationship with Thoreau?
Emerson was fourteen years older and became Thoreau’s mentor and friend in Concord. In 1845 he let Thoreau build the cabin at Walden Pond on his land, where Thoreau lived while writing what became Walden. After Thoreau died in 1862, Emerson gave the eulogy, printed in The Atlantic as “Thoreau”.
When did Ralph Waldo Emerson die?
On 27 April 1882 in Concord, Massachusetts, at 78, of pneumonia. From the early 1870s his memory had been failing. He is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord.
Footnotes
- Ralph Waldo Emerson — Wikipedia
- Divinity School Address — Wikipedia
- When religion turned inward — Harvard Gazette, 2012
- The Respect and Affection of Concord — Concord Free Public Library
- The Conduct of Life — Wikipedia
- Ralph Waldo Emerson — PBS, God in America
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”, Essays: First Series (1841)
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