Word: rusk
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...LIFE OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON (592 pp.) -Ralph L. Rusk - Scribner...
Palms in Paris. No previous biographer has detailed the nagging poverty of the Emerson family as closely as Author Rusk -the boarders in the house, and the gifts of money that arrived at the last moment. Other biographers have told the story of Emerson's teaching after his graduation from Harvard; Biographer Rusk gives the subjects he assigned to his girl students for English composition, his comments on their papers. Other biographers have touched lightly on the tragedies in Emerson's family; Rusk tells in detail of his brother Bulkeley, who lived past middle age without developing mentally...
Freedom in Concord. At first glance, Professor Rusk's biography seems to tilt the figure of Emerson as Americans have come to know him. The work of a 60-year-old professor at Columbia University, it is a massive, detailed, thorough, factual study, the first biography in 60 years to reflect a careful sifting of Emerson's unpublished manuscripts and papers. Heretofore, the standard source books on Emerson have been the work of his literary executors, James Elliot Cabot and Edward
...greatest limitation of Rusk's book is its lack of enthusiasm and feeling. It shows Emerson as far more practical, sometimes calculating, and much less steadily conscious of his purpose in life than has been believed. One great discovery concealed or slurred over by previous biographers is that much of Emerson's life was dull. Moreover, Rusk admits that he has been greatly attracted by one aspect of Emerson-his struggle "to keep his little area of personal freedom safe from encroachment." The emphasis is consequently upon his independence, his reserve with family and friends, his ties with...
...Rusk goes over the tedium and labor of Emerson's lectures with great detail. A reader not familiar with Emerson's writing might get from this book an impression that he was a rather colorless ex-clergyman who lived a good but uneventful life in a dull New England town, and that the chief distinction of his career was that he successfully avoided being monopolized by any person or idea...