Ralph Waldo Emerson 
Representative Men 

Classic collection of essays on great men, with 13 illustrations. According to Wikipedia: ‘Representative Men is a collection of seven lectures by Ralph Waldo Emerson, published as a book of essays in 1850. The first essay discusses the role played by ‘great men’ in society, and the remaining six each extoll the virtues of one of six men deemed by Emerson to be great: Plato (‘the Philosopher’), Emanuel Swedenborg (‘the Mystic’), Michel de Montaigne (‘the Skeptic’), William Shakespeare (‘the Poet’), Napoleon (‘the Man of the World’), and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (‘the Writer’). The work was described by Matthew Arnold as ‘the most important work done in prose’… Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882) was an American essayist, philosopher, poet, and leader of the Transcendentalist movement in the early 19th century. His teachings directly influenced the growing New Thought movement of the mid 1800s. Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature. As a result of this ground breaking work he gave a speech entitled The American Scholar in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America’s ‘Intellectual Declaration of Independence’. Emerson once said ‘Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.’