The American Scholar

Drawing of Emerson by Sam W. Rowse

On August 31, 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered “An Oration,” later entitled “The American Scholar,” to an audience in Cambridge, Massachusetts that included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, James Russell Lowell, Richard Henry Dana, Wendell Phillips, and Edward Everett. The occasion was the annual meeting of Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Society. Five hundred copies of the talk were printed and sold out within weeks. Fifty years later, Oliver Wendell Holmes declared the speech to be America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence.”

Emerson wrote “The American Scholar” to liberate the individual, not a group—or in this case, his audience. He directly addressed the issues of individual Americans becoming self-reliant: “the single man plant himself indomitable on his instincts and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.” From then on, his writing was directed at the individual, not any institution. He wanted to inspire original thought, to encourage people not to be bound by past traditions or the thoughts of others, regardless of how education strived to influence and control the thoughts of its students. “Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote those books.” 

— B. Ewen, Emerson House guide