The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson
by Ralph L. Rusk
Summary
The first winner of the first National Book Award for Nonfiction is a life of Ralph Waldo Emerson built from the ground up out of his letters. Ralph L. Rusk, a professor of English at Columbia, had spent a decade editing the six volumes of Emerson's correspondence published in 1939, and the biography that followed in 1949 rests on that labor: more than fourteen thousand note cards tracking where Emerson was, what he read, whom he wrote to, and what he owed, now archived at Columbia. The book follows Emerson from a Boston boyhood shadowed by his father's early death, through Harvard, the pulpit of Second Church, and the crisis of faith that made him resign it, to the decades in Concord where he built a living out of lectures and essays and gathered Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and the Alcotts around him. Rusk writes as a documentary scholar rather than a dramatist. He does not psychoanalyze and he rarely speculates; when Emerson grieves for his first wife Ellen or his young son Waldo, the evidence carries the feeling. The reward of that restraint is trust. A reader always knows the ground under every sentence, and the Emerson who emerges, practical about money, generous to difficult friends, steadily working his journals into lectures and his lectures into essays, is more believable than the marble sage of legend. When the publishing industry created the National Book Awards in 1950, this was the book the judges chose to stand first in the nonfiction line, ahead of every winner that followed. Later biographers have drawn new portraits of Emerson, but they all stand on Rusk's documentation.
Historical Context & Significance
The National Book Awards began in March 1950, organized by American publishers, booksellers, and librarians to honor books chosen by writers and critics rather than by sales. Rusk's Emerson won the first nonfiction award, sharing the inaugural stage with Nelson Algren's The Man with the Golden Arm in fiction and William Carlos Williams in poetry. The choice signaled what the new prize valued: patient scholarship on an American subject. Emerson studies were then entering a boom, with Rusk's edition of the letters opening sources earlier biographers never saw, and his life of Emerson remained the standard account for decades. Rusk taught at Columbia for almost thirty years, and his research files are preserved in the university's archives, where scholars of the American renaissance still consult the note cards behind this book.