""An Institution is the lengthened shadow of one man," Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote - and in this book, the author looks at the long shadow Emerson himself has cast, and at his role and significance as a truly American institution. On the occasion of Emerson's 200th birthday, Lawrence Buell revisits the life of the nation's first public intellectual and discovers how he became a "representative man."" Born into the age of inspired amateurism that emerged from the ruins of pre-revolutionary political, religious, and cultural institutions, Emerson took up the challenges of thinking about the role of the United States alone and in the world. With characteristic authority and grace, Buell conveys both the style and the substance of Emerson's accomplishment in his conception of America as the transplantation of Englishness into the new world and in his prodigious work as writer, religious thinker, and philosopher.