Albert J. von Frank

The first edition of An Emerson Chronology appeared in 1994. The long-awaited, thoroughly revised, much-expanded second edition of this indispensable reference work runs to more than 1100 pages, comprising two volumes. This is the second volume of the two-volume edition. Praise for An Emerson Chronology "This new, expanded edition of the Emerson Chronology is the best thing to happen in Emerson studies since the completion of the Collected Works. An invaluable tool for all Emerson scholars, this authoritative resource serves as a concise, detailed, and easily accessible blueprint for the life of one of America's greatest writers. No nineteenth-century collection should be without it." - Len Gougeon, Distinguished Professor of American Literature, University of Scranton, author of Virtue's Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform "The Emerson Chronology provides an invaluable detailed account of Emerson's publishing career, his travels and lecturing, his relations with family and famous contemporaries, his reading, health-history, home-life, and friendships. In so doing, it recreates the architecture of Emerson's life so that we may clothe it with whatever Emerson is 'ours.' Revised and nearly doubled in size from the 1994 edition, this is a model of the type and an essential work for anyone studying Emerson and his period." - Joel Myerson, Carolina Distinguished Professor of American Literature, Emeritus, University of South Carolina. "An Emerson Chronology has long been an indispensable aid to every serious scholar of the Concord Sage. Now, in this expanded edition, Albert von Frank enriches our appreciation of Emerson's works and days with a wider view of his social circle in Concord, Boston, and beyond, with pertinent extracts from letters and journals about the leading events of the times, with comments by friends and critics about his essays and lectures, and with the stuff of life that transforms a chronology into a subtle and dense biography. Bank notes and books, sick children, desperate friends, prating politicians, inspiring prophets, people everywhere in search of guidance and meaning, and ideas bursting from the page: these 'herbs and apples' of Emerson's days come before us to savor and ponder, each one a diadem. This is a volume with new insights and connections to be discovered with every reading. We are all in von Frank's debt." - Robert A. Gross, Professor of History Emeritus, University of Connecticut, author of The Minutemen and Their World and of the forthcoming Transcendentalists and Their World

The first edition of An Emerson Chronology appeared in 1994. The long-awaited, thoroughly revised, much-expanded second edition of this indispensable reference work runs to more than 1100 pages, comprising two volumes. This is the first volume of the two-volume edition. Praise for An Emerson Chronology "This new, expanded edition of the Emerson Chronology is the best thing to happen in Emerson studies since the completion of the Collected Works. An invaluable tool for all Emerson scholars, this authoritative resource serves as a concise, detailed, and easily accessible blueprint for the life of one of America's greatest writers. No nineteenth-century collection should be without it." - Len Gougeon, Distinguished Professor of American Literature, University of Scranton, author of Virtue's Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform "The Emerson Chronology provides an invaluable detailed account of Emerson's publishing career, his travels and lecturing, his relations with family and famous contemporaries, his reading, health-history, home-life, and friendships. In so doing, it recreates the architecture of Emerson's life so that we may clothe it with whatever Emerson is 'ours.' Revised and nearly doubled in size from the 1994 edition, this is a model of the type and an essential work for anyone studying Emerson and his period." - Joel Myerson, Carolina Distinguished Professor of American Literature, Emeritus, University of South Carolina. "An Emerson Chronology has long been an indispensable aid to every serious scholar of the Concord Sage. Now, in this expanded edition, Albert von Frank enriches our appreciation of Emerson's works and days with a wider view of his social circle in Concord, Boston, and beyond, with pertinent extracts from letters and journals about the leading events of the times, with comments by friends and critics about his essays and lectures, and with the stuff of life that transforms a chronology into a subtle and dense biography. Bank notes and books, sick children, desperate friends, prating politicians, inspiring prophets, people everywhere in search of guidance and meaning, and ideas bursting from the page: these 'herbs and apples' of Emerson's days come before us to savor and ponder, each one a diadem. This is a volume with new insights and connections to be discovered with every reading. We are all in von Frank's debt." - Robert A. Gross, Professor of History Emeritus, University of Connecticut, author of The Minutemen and Their World and of the forthcoming Transcendentalists and Their World

This book is a meditation on the theme of provincialism in American literature. With careful attention to the historical context, it identifies in the expressions of writers before the Civil War certain qualities of self-doubt and defensiveness, certain perceptions of displacement and decline, so profoundly characteristic as to amount to a defining trait of American literature. As a frontier nation, America lacked an organic culture of its own and embarked on the impossibly difficult task of creating a cultural life from imported forms and ideas. Albert von Frank shows the history of this effort to be one of a desperate conservatism struggling against the withering effects of time and distance on cherished standards of the past.

Before 1854, most Northerners managed to ignore the distant unpleasantness of slavery. But that year an escaped Virginia slave, Anthony Burns, was captured and brought to trial in Boston--and never again could Northerners look the other way. This is the story of Burns's trial and of how, arising in abolitionist Boston just as the incendiary Kansas-Nebraska Act took effect, it revolutionized the moral and political climate in Massachusetts and sent shock waves through the nation.In a searching cultural analysis, Albert J. von Frank draws us into the drama and the consequences of the case. He introduces the individuals who contended over the fate of the barely literate twenty-year-old runaway slave--figures as famous as Richard Henry Dana Jr., the defense attorney, as colorful as Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Bronson Alcott, who led a mob against the courthouse where Burns was held, and as intriguing as Moncure Conway, the Virginia-born abolitionist who spied on Burns's master.The story is one of desperate acts, even murder--a special deputy slain at the courthouse door--but it is also steeped in ideas. Von Frank links the deeds and rhetoric surrounding the Burns case to New England Transcendentalism, principally that of Ralph Waldo Emerson. His book is thus also a study of how ideas relate to social change, exemplified in the art and expression of Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Theodore Parker, Bronson Alcott, Walt Whitman, and others.Situated at a politically critical moment--with the Whig party collapsing and the Republican arising, with provocations and ever hotter rhetoric intensifying regional tensions--the case of Anthony Burns appears here as the most important fugitive slave case in American history. A stirring work of intellectual and cultural history, this book shows how the Burns affair brought slavery home to the people of Boston and brought the nation that much closer to the Civil War.

This book is a meditation on the theme of provincialism in American literature. With careful attention to the historical context, it identifies in the expressions of writers before the Civil War certain qualities of self-doubt and defensiveness, certain perceptions of displacement and decline, so profoundly characteristic as to amount to a defining trait of American literature. As a frontier nation, America lacked an organic culture of its own and embarked on the impossibly difficult task of creating a cultural life from imported forms and ideas. Albert von Frank shows the history of this effort to be one of a desperate conservatism struggling against the withering effects of time and distance on cherished standards of the past.