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1  O N E A Genre in Transition Biography in the 1880s In November 1877 James Elliot Cabot received a letter from Edward Waldo Emerson, asking him to write his father’s biography. Cabot had already agreed some two years earlier to serve as Emerson’s literary executor , making sense of the mountain of manuscript drafts, journals, lectures, notebooks, and letters that constituted Emerson’s literary legacy. Working closely with family, especially with Emerson’s elder daughter Ellen, he had put several volumes into shape, including one, Letters and Social Aims, that Emerson himself admitted was more “Mr. Cabot’s book” than his own. Edward ’s latest request could not have been welcome, for Cabot was unpracticed as a biographer and had already devoted several years to a task he accepted without pay, a favor for a man he admired and a family to whom he was related distantly by marriage. For his part, Edward found it a difficult request to make, as witness the worked-over rough draft of his letter that survives with the fair copy. But there was no time to waste, for the family had a “strong suspicion” that two other men were “already collecting materials for that purpose.” “Father shudders at the thought that these persons should do the work,” Edward confided to Cabot, and the family was eager to make an “arrangement that would please him and thus to be able in the simplest way to forestall any future application by them for help and material.” The two unsuitable biographers, never named, were most likely Moncure D. Conway and Frank Sanborn, both well known to the Emersons. As early as 1872, just after a devastating fire gutted the Emerson home and in the midst of a debacle over a proposed English edition of his uncol- 2 C H A P T E R O N E lected works, Waldo Emerson told the family how he “dreaded” Conway’s or Sanborn’s getting hold of his papers, and he had already cautioned his friend Thomas Carlyle to steer clear of Conway, who couldn’t keep his facts straight. Now, in 1877, two family advisors—Edward’s draft of the letter identifies them as William Henry Channing and Henry James Sr.—were urging the Emersons to “take some steps” to secure a proper biographer. As Edward recalled long afterward, even before the fire his father had “wistfully” mentioned Cabot as someone who could “deal with his manuscripts when he was gone” but thought the favor too great to ask. Clearly, the steady, businesslike Cabot was the early frontrunner as the steward of Emerson’s papers, and years afterward every one of the Emerson children acknowledged Cabot’s work with undisguised gratitude. Cabot’s transition from executor to biographer was a logical, if momentous, progression of events. Cabot’s reply to the family’s request in 1877 points out some personal and generic issues that inform not only the construction of Emerson’s image after his death but also the larger enterprise of biography in the Gilded Age. He accepted the invitation with unfeigned trepidation: honored to be asked to write Emerson’s biography, he felt unfit for the task but was “willing to undertake to collect the material for the right man whenever he shall appear.” Four years later he reiterated those doubts, in a letter to Ellen Tucker Emerson: I do not expect to write anything that could be considered a biography or a full account of your Father—should I survive him. . . . At any rate, I am not the person to do it. What I expect to undertake if the case arises is to put in shape what information is at hand & can be got from his journals & mss. to supplement the accounts that the public already have. As Ellen reported back to her sister Edith Emerson Forbes, Cabot’s demurral had the family worried, but they were confident he would stay the course. “Only he wants us to understand that he doesn’t call it a biography which last, he thinks, needs a perspective of fifty to a hundred years.” What seems to be at most a semantic disagreement over the word “biography ” is in fact much more than that, especially when we realize how cagey some of Emerson’s other early biographers also were when describing what they were doing. Cooke insisted that his 1881 Ralph Waldo Emerson: His Life, Writings, and Philosophy was biographical “only because light may be thrown upon his books...

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