Document Type
Book
Publication Date
2000
Abstract
Shortly after midday on 31 August 1837, thirty-four-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson stepped before the Harvard chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts, preparing to give the annual oration associated with the university’s commencement exercises. In the audience, in addition to some two hundred students, were such luminaries as the physician-essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Abolitionist Wendell Phillips, the poet James Russell Lowell, and the governor of Massachusetts, Edward Everett, who later became president of Harvard. Emerson’s presentation, entitled “The American Scholar,” lasted for slightly more than an hour (Richardson 261-63).
Recommended Citation
Erisman, Fred. Reading A.B. Guthrie's 'The Big Sky'. Boise, ID: Boise State University, 2000. Digital. Western Writers Series, 145.