The Conduct of Life

Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860. First edition, first print. Octavo. Publisher's full brown cloth stamped in gilt. 288. Water stains on front cloth, small stain on back cloth, moderate wear on spine's top and bottom, light water staining on top first 20 numbered pages, ex libris paper label, previous owner inscriptions in pencil on ffep, previous owner stamp on half-title page, front cloth corner starting at the top, notes in pencil on last two blank pages, still a near good copy.

Published in the year Abraham Lincoln was elected President, Emerson's Conduct of Life is a collection of his essays on philosophy. Asking questions like "How should I live?" it became one of his most successful publications and even being a source that inspired philosophy giants such as Friedrich Nietzsche.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was known as the father of American literature as he helped America break from free from European ties. "We have listened too long to the Courtly muses of Europe." said Emerson in his 1837 address titled The American Scholar, later nicknamed "America's intellectual declaration of independence" by writer Oliver Wendell Holmes Senior. Emerson's push for America to create its own intellectual path in the world instead of "grope among the dry bones of the past" (Nature) had, still even two centuries later, become the pedestal for America becoming the independent country that it is today.