Joel Porte is Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters, Cornell University. He has written extensively on American Renaissance figures and is the author of Emerson and Thoreau: Transcendentalists in Conflict and Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time, among other books.

"His essays are like Thoreau's sauntering, invitations to follow an acute and learned scholar to places you had not visited with such a guide. What this collection 'adds up' to, then, is forty-five years worth of rumination on two of this country's finest minds by someone eminently suited to investigate them in all their varied complexity."—Philip F. Gura, William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Joel Porte is Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters, Cornell University. He has written extensively on American Renaissance figures and is the author of Emerson and Thoreau: Transcendentalists in Conflict and Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time, among other books.

"His essays are like Thoreau's sauntering, invitations to follow an acute and learned scholar to places you had not visited with such a guide. What this collection 'adds up' to, then, is forty-five years worth of rumination on two of this country's finest minds by someone eminently suited to investigate them in all their varied complexity."—Philip F. Gura, William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Joel Porte is Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters, Cornell University. He has written extensively on American Renaissance figures and is the author of Emerson and Thoreau: Transcendentalists in Conflict and Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time, among other books.

"His essays are like Thoreau's sauntering, invitations to follow an acute and learned scholar to places you had not visited with such a guide. What this collection 'adds up' to, then, is forty-five years worth of rumination on two of this country's finest minds by someone eminently suited to investigate them in all their varied complexity."—Philip F. Gura, William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill