Letterpress on paper, with manuscript edits.  Joel Myerson Collection of Nineteenth-Century American Literature, University of South Carolina.

Known today simply as the “American Scholar,” the formal title of Emerson’s address is An Oration, Delivered Before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837.  This seventy-five-minute address was called by Oliver Wendell Holmes America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence.”  Under the guise of delivering a traditional commencement address, Emerson walked into what many considered the finest university in the land, in the greatest city in the land, and said to the best members of the graduating class that they should have spent their time more wisely: “ . . . if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him,” and he will be known as the “American Scholar,” or “Man Thinking.” 

Joel Myerson comments about these proofsheets: “I purchased this from Jenkins & Company of Austin, Texas, with the help of Kevin MacDonnell, who was employed there at the time.  The original price was way beyond my means, so I paid $650 and traded a Hawthorne letter, my Jack London first edition collection, and the Stone and Kimball edition of Poe’s writings for an item I couldn’t possibly let get away.”

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