Field's book is a welcome addition to the literature that examines Emerson as a product of his times and explores how, throughout his life, he attempted to situate himself as a spokesman for a particular issue or issues. . . . Field has produced an excellent, suggestive evaluation of the public Emerson-the one who continually refashioned himself as his ideas and venues changed-and a book that deserves to be placed among the best studies of Emerson's intellectual and professional development.

Joel Myerson, New England Quarterly

Field stands atop the current reassessment of Ralph Waldo Emerson's public voice with his fresh sense of all the relevant texts and contexts, from origins in the Boston ministry through national politics of the Civil War era. This book makes an admirable case for nineteenth-century America's most influential thinker.

Phyllis Cole, Penn State University, Delaware County

Field does a convincing job of showing the growth of this public thinker, and his volume certainly adds to our understanding of the man and his times.

Susan L. Roberson, H-Shear

None of Ralph Waldo Emerson's accomplishments was more important than his reinvention of himself. Peter S. Field persuasively traces Emerson's transformation from Unitarian minister to public intellectual in this able biography of one of the 19th century's most enduring figures.

Conrad Edick Wright, Massachusetts Historical Society

As a brief for Emerson as a public intellectual, Field's book is valuable and has the virtue of offering readers a focused examination of the ways in which, from the years of his first ministry on, this seminal thinker understood that the age demanded a new kind of cultural critic.

Philip F. Gura, Reviews in American History

Peter Field's new study of Emerson portrays him in very human and compelling terms, searching for his self, finding his voice and vocation, and becoming America's prototypical 'public intellectual.' Emerson springs to life in its pages, engaged with the challenges facing his age. A wonderful introduction to the Sage of Concord.

John F. Wilson, Princeton University