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135  introduction 1. OWH to George Bancroft, 16 January 1885, George Bancroft Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. 2. Holmes, A Mortal Antipathy (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1892), 7:17. 3. “Reminiscences,” New-York Times, 2 May 1882. 4. H. L. Kleinfield, “The Structure of Emerson’s Death,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 65 (1961): 58. 5. Kleinfield, 64. 6. William Henry Channing, “R. W. Emerson,” Modern Review 3 (October 1882): 852. 7. Conway to Ellen Tucker Emerson, 6 June 1882, bMS Am 1280.226 (3302). Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association deposit, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Not to be reproduced in whole or in part without permission. 8. The six major biographies of Emerson in the 1880s are as follows: George Willis Cooke, Ralph Waldo Emerson: His Life, Writings, and Philosophy (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1881); Alexander Ireland, In Memoriam. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Recollections of His Visits to England in 1833, 1847–8, 1872–3, and Extracts from Unpublished Letters (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1882), later expanded as Ralph Waldo Emerson: His Life, Genius, and Writings. A Biographical Sketch (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1882); Moncure Daniel Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1882; London: Trübner, 1883); Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1885 [c. 1884]); James Elliot Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 2 volumes (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1887); and Edward Waldo Emerson, Emerson in Concord: A Memoir (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1889 [c. 1888]). 9. By concentrating on biographies by writers who actually knew Emerson, I am very consciously making a value judgment about the importance of biographical authority, which shall be pursued in chapter six. But it is worth noting several notes 136 N OT E S TO PA G E S x v i i – x i x full-length studies in the 1880s by writers who never met Emerson and whose work was largely derivative. Alfred Hudson Guernsey’s Ralph Waldo Emerson: Philosopher and Poet (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1881), mostly excerpts of published writing, was advertised on a tipped-in sheet as “published by arrangement with Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.” I can find no other record of that arrangement, but since Appleton’s line was often pitched at schoolroom use, likely Houghton, Mifflin saw the prospect of a financial return without serious competition with Cabot’s promised volumes. Guernsey (1818–1902) was a popular historian and the editor of Alden’s Cyclopedia of Universal Literature (1884–1891), writing most of its 20 volumes himself. Richard Garnett’s Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (London: Walter Scott, 1888) is a popular account based solely on secondary sources. Garnett (1835–1906), a prolific English historian and bibliophile, also wrote biographies of Milton, Blake, Carlyle, and Coleridge, most of them for Scott’s “Great Writers” series. Bronson Alcott ’s Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Estimate of His Character and Genius, in Prose and Verse (Boston: A. Williams, 1882), written by one of Emerson’s oldest friends and most consistent admirers, is actually a slightly modified reprint of Alcott’s earlier lecture Emerson (Cambridge: privately printed, 1865) that was rushed back into print after Emerson’s death and is not, despite its title, biographical. 10. Paul Ricoeur, “Objectivity and Subjectivity in History,” in History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 27–28. 11. Susan Tridgell, Understanding Our Selves: The Dangerous Art of Biography (Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2004), 165, 166, 27, 168. 12. Robert D. Richardson Jr., “The Perils of Writing Biography,” in Lives Out of Letters: Essays on American Literary Biography and Documentation, ed. Robert D. Habich (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004), 254. 13. Stanley Fish, “Just Published: Minutiae without Meaning,” New York Times, 7 September 1999. See also John Worthen, who calls biographical coherence a “confidence trick” (“The Necessary Ignorance of a Biographer,” in The Art of Literary Biography, ed. John Batchelor [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995], 240). 14. Margaret O. W. Oliphant, “The Ethics of Biography,” Contemporary Review [London] 44 (1883): 76–93. For other uses of the desecration metaphor see John Stallworthy , “A Life for a Life,” in The Art of Literary Biography, ed. John Batchelor, 27–42. 15. George Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954–1978), 6:26. 16. Scott E. Casper, Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 245, 7–9. 17. Ronald A. Bosco, “We Find What We...

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