The Selected Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson, who followed Montaigne in never overvaluing reading, is now interred under 38 volumes of lectures, letters, journals and notebooks. For those daunted by the Ralph L. Rusk edition of 4500 letters (also published by Columbia), Myerson has done a great service by compiling 350 of Emerson's most essential, which together form the outline of an illuminating intellectual biography. The most devoted reader of Emerson's essays can become exasperated by the gulf that separates the thrill of his rhetoric from the mundane necessity of everyday life; and the letters don't exactly bridge the gap.