GRE Subject Test: Literature in English : Identification of American Prose Before 1925
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Example Question #21 : Identification Of American Prose Before 1925
This author, from Boston, was an ordained minister. He was a philosopher, essayist, and poet who explored the mind and man's relationship with nature. In one of his works, he writes:
"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Mark Twain
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Washington Irving
James Fenimore Cooper
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) explored the mind and man's relationship with nature. This excerpt is from his essay Self-Reliance. Emerson's style can be seen in the essays Nature and Self-Reliance. He wrote many letters to President Martin Van Buren noting that the removal of Cherokee Native Americans from their lands was an injustice. He was a Transcendentalist who protested against the general state of intellectualism and spirituality.
Passage adapted from "Self-Reliance" in Essays: First Series by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841)
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