The American Scholar: An Address

"The American Scholar" is a speech by Ralph Waldo Emerson to Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa Society on August 31, 1837. The scholar he describes is "a man standing among other men now living, or who shall live." Emerson argues that the United States has been producing an increasingly literate society over the past 50 years, and that now is the time for those scholars to build on their predecessors' work and create a nation of truly great thinkers. "The American Scholar" is the most famous of his lectures. He wrote it to be delivered as an address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard University, but it was soon published in London and was not well received. It is one of the most important documents of Transcendentalism.