Representative Men by Ralph Waldo Emerson on Free Audio Book Download

Without doubt, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writing helped form the early American literary tradition, and it’s arguable that his greatest achievements are exemplified in the many essays that form the body of his work. The collection recorded here on free audiobook download from Librivox is a philosophical series that tries to examine how a single person can come to represent the best virtues of their given era. Using historical luminaries such as Plato, Shakespeare, and Goethe among others as his subjects, Emerson uses their lives to ruminate on “greatness”. Are the qualities that make someone great somehow innate, or does an era force greatness upon the individual? Each life is examined in Emerson’s signature style, a prose that mixes both astute psychological insight and poetic reflection in a way that one rarely gets from a regular biography. Download this unabridged 7-hour audio book from Librivox.