American Scholar Day

Graycliff’s Annual Celebration of American Scholar Day

Every once a year I have the boys around me read Emerson’s The American Scholar.

 Get it and read it if you haven’t read it.

Frank Lloyd Wright, address to architecture students, Chicago, 1957

Frank Lloyd Wright thought there should be a national holiday called American Scholar Day. He observed such a day himself on August 31st, the anniversary of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s lecture called The American Scholar. Called America's literary Declaration of Independence, this statement on American education and learning is one of Ralph Waldo Emerson's best-known essays.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.  Emerson typically gave speeches, which were subsequently published as essays.

The American Scholar was a speech given by Emerson on August 31, 1837, to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was invited to speak in recognition of his groundbreaking work Nature, published a year earlier, in which he established a new way for America's fledgling society to regard the world. Sixty years after declaring independence, American culture was still heavily influenced by Europe, and Emerson, for possibly the first time in the country's history, provided a visionary philosophical framework for escaping "from under its iron lids" and building a new, distinctly American cultural identity.

This coming Saturday, Graycliff will be distributing free copies of Emerson's essay on the topic.  Or you can read a copy of it here:  The American Scholar by Ralph Waldo Emerson