About the Author

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was an American essayist and poet.  Along with such figures as Henry Thoreau and Margaret Fuller, he was an originator and, through the magazine The Dial, popularizer of the Transcendentalist movement.  In essays like "Self-Reliance," he championed a distinctly American brand of individualism. 

David Mikics is John and Rebecca Moores Professor of Honors and English at the University of Houston. His books include Slow Reading in a Hurried Age, The Annotated Emerson, and Bellow's People. A 2017 Guggenheim Fellow, he is a columnist for Tablet magazine and lives in Brooklyn and Houston.