Whether in her present numerous agonies of disorder, America can transcend despair and rebuild her national character is doubtful—impossible in the minds of some. But one thing is certain: It can happen only by fidelity to the American experience of a transcending Christian authority, and fidelity to the finest of her social values, customs, and [...]
There could be no Henry David Thoreau without a Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson glorified the individual independence of the new American; Thoreau evolved that into a nation-less, anarchic, natural man of subjective conscience. In 1838, Harvard College exiled a young James Russell Lowell to the tutelage of a minister in Concord, Massachusetts, a suspension for [...]
To know what I was like as a teenager in the eighties, you should know this: at a time when most boys’ heroes were sports figures, mine was an antisocial weirdo who had been dead for 125 years. I first encountered Henry David Thoreau when Mrs. Meyer, my eighth-grade English teacher, assigned us his essay [...]