Synopses & Reviews
Emerson and Thoreau are the most celebrated odd couple of nineteenth-century American literature. Appearing to play the roles of benign mentor and eager disciple, they can also be seen as bitter rivals: Americaand#8217;s foremost literary statesman, protective of his reputation, and an ambitious and sometimes refractory protand#233;gand#233;. The truth, Joel Porte maintains, is that Emerson and Thoreau were complementary literary geniuses, mutually inspiring and inspired.
In this book of essays, Porte focuses on Emerson and Thoreau as writers. He traces their individual achievements and their points of intersection, arguing that both men, starting from a shared belief in the importance of and#147;self-culture,and#8221; produced a body of writing that helped move a decidedly provincial New England readership into the broader arena of international culture. It is a book that will appeal to all readers interested in the writings of Emerson and Thoreau.
Review
"His essays are like Thoreau's sauntering, invitations to follow an acute and learned scholar to places you had not visited with such a guide. What this collection 'adds up' to, then, is forty-five years worth of rumination on two of this country's finest minds by someone eminently suited to investigate them in all their varied complexity."and#8212;Philip F. Gura, William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Review
"Porte's concentration on Emerson as writer is not so common an approach as it may seem; balanced against the way in which Emerson is conventionally consideredand#8212;as philosopher, as aphorist, as cultural iconand#8212;Porte's keen attention to the quality of the prose itself and the artfulness of an essay's organization yields rewarding and highly readable results."and#8212;Larzer Ziff, Johns Hopkins University
Synopsis
This book relates how, between 1954 and 1961, the biologist Seymour Benzer mapped the fine structure of the rII region of the genome of the bacterial virus known as phage T4. Benzer's accomplishments are widely recognized as a tipping point in mid-twentieth-century molecular biology when the nature of the gene was recast in molecular terms. More often than any other individual, he is considered to have led geneticists from the classical gene into the molecular age.
Drawing on Benzer's remarkably complete record of his experiments, his correspondence, and published sources, this book reconstructs how the former physicist initiated his work in phage biology and achieved his landmark investigation. The account of Benzer's creativity as a researcher is a fascinating story that also reveals intriguing aspects common to the scientific enterprise.
About the Author
Joel Porte is Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters, Cornell University. He has written extensively on American Renaissance figures and is the author of Emerson and Thoreau: Transcendentalists in Conflict and Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time, among other books.