"When a literary icon stays with the Dickinson family, Emily and her housemaid Willa find themselves embroiled in a shocking murder in this new mystery from USA Today bestselling and Agatha Award-winning author Amanda Flower. August 1856. The Dickinson family is comfortably settled in their homestead on Main Street. Emily's brother, Austin Dickinson, and his new wife are delighted when famous thinker and writer Ralph Waldo Emerson comes to Amherst...

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of an elite group of literary geniuses secretly working on America's first translation of "The Divine Comedy" in 1865, puts his career on the line when he teams up with outcast police officer Nicholas Rey in an attempt to find a killer who is patterning his crimes on descriptions of Hell's punishments from Dante's "Inferno."

A generation after Americans had freed themselves politically and economically from Britain, it would be up to Ralph Waldo Emerson to carry the Revolution to individual men and women by exhorting them to a freedom of the spirit as well. Through a detailed recounting of Emerson's life, this program traces his vision of the ideal in America from its genesis to its flowering as the principles of Transcendentalism. Readings from Emerson's journals, addresses,...

Before Ralph Waldo Emerson was a great writer, he was a city boy who longed for the broad, open fields and deep, still woods of the country, and then a young man who treasured books, ideas, and people. When he grew up and set out in the world, he wondered, could he build a life around these things he loved? This biography illustrates the rewards of a life well-lived, one built around personal passions: creativity and community, nature and friendship....

Few movements in American social and intellectual history have been as influential as the cluster of ideas which have come to be called Transcendentalism. From Ralph Waldo Emerson's "self-reliant soul" and Henry David Thoreau's "different drummer" to modern ideas about individualism and democracy, Transcendentalism has had a powerful impact on central aspects of American life. The course begins with a study Emerson and Thoreau, the two figures at...

Annie Burns answers an ad requesting an extraordinary cook needed to get Mr. Emerson to eat real food to supplement the nourishment he derives from nature through his imagination.

"More than two centuries after his birth, Ralph Waldo Emerson remains one of the presiding spirits in American culture. Yet his reputation as the starry-eyed prophet of self-reliance has obscured a much more complicated figure, who spent a lifetime wrestling with injustice, philosophy, art, desire, and suffering. James Marcus introduces readers to this Emerson, a writer of self-interrogating genius whose visionary flights are always grounded in Yankee...