The Rise of Modern Mythology, 1680-1860

"... peerless... " ―The Key Reporter
"... this book is a first. It will be a standard... Comprehensiveness as well as the clarity of the headnotes should make it endure." ―Choice
"... so good as it stands... one should simply be happy to have it." ―The Journal of the History of Ideas 
"... an original, compendious, and highly useful contribution to historical and mythographical scholarship." ―The American Scholar
"The Rise of Modern Mythology is a voice of reason in the contemporary maelstrom of international religious violence and American pluralism; more than any book I know, it exposes the roots of the Western appropriation of non-Western mythologies, from Lawrence of Arabia and Omar Khayyam to Tibetan Buddhism in Hollywood and Krishna Consciousness in airports. This is a book that we need now." ―Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions, The University of Chicago

Literature & Fiction

Richardson Jr., Robert D.

Feldman, Burton

History & Criticism

Indiana University Press

"... peerless... " —The Key Reporter
"... this book is a first. It will be a standard... Comprehensiveness as well as the clarity of the headnotes should make it endure." —Choice
"... so good as it stands... one should simply be happy to have it." —The Journal of the History of Ideas 
"... an original, compendious, and highly useful contribution to historical and mythographical scholarship." —The American Scholar
"The Rise of Modern Mythology is a voice of reason in the contemporary maelstrom of international religious violence and American pluralism; more than any book I know, it exposes the roots of the Western appropriation of non-Western mythologies, from Lawrence of Arabia and Omar Khayyam to Tibetan Buddhism in Hollywood and Krishna Consciousness in airports. This is a book that we need now." —Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions, The University of Chicago

Religion & Spirituality

The two years Thoreau spent at Walden Pond and the night he spent in the Concord jail are among the most familiar features of the American intellectual landscape. In this new biography, based on a reexamination of Thoreau's manuscripts and on a retracing of his trips, Robert Richardson offers a view of Thoreau's life and achievement in their full nineteenth century context.

Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

Biographies & Memoirs

Moser, Barry

Arts & Literature

University of California Press

Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most important figures in the history of American thought, religion, and literature. The vitality of his writings and the unsettling power of his example continue to influence us more than a hundred years after his death. Now Robert D. Richardson Jr. brings to life an Emerson very different from the old stereotype of the passionless Sage of Concord. Drawing on a vast amount of new material, including correspondence among the Emerson brothers, Richardson gives us a rewarding intellectual biography that is also a portrait of the whole man. These pages present a young suitor, a grief-stricken widower, an affectionate father, and a man with an abiding genius for friendship. The great spokesman for individualism and self-reliance turns out to have been a good neighbor, an activist citizen, a loyal brother. Here is an Emerson who knew how to laugh, who was self-doubting as well as self-reliant, and who became the greatest intellectual adventurer of his age. Richardson has, as much as possible, let Emerson speak for himself through his published works, his many journals and notebooks, his letters, his reported conversations. This is not merely a study of Emerson's writing and his influence on others; it is Emerson's life as he experienced it. We see the failed minister, the struggling writer, the political reformer, the poetic liberator. The Emerson of this book not only influenced Thoreau, Fuller, Whitman, Dickinson, and Frost, he also inspired Nietzsche, William James, Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Jorge Luis Borges. Emerson's timeliness is persistent and striking: his insistence that literature and science are not separate cultures, his emphasis on the worth of every individual, his respect for nature. Richardson gives careful attention to the enormous range of Emerson's readings―from Persian poets to George Sand―and to his many friendships and personal encounters―from Mary Moody Emerson to the Cherokee chiefs in Boston―evoking both the man and the times in which he lived. Throughout this book, Emerson's unquenchable vitality reaches across the decades, and his hold on us endures.

Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Centennial Books)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Richardson Jr., Robert D.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Richardson Jr., Robert D.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Richardson Jr., Robert D.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Rise of Modern Mythology, 1680-1860

The Rise of Modern Mythology, 1680-1860

Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Centennial Books)