First We Read, Then We Write

"Robert Richardson has done exquisite service both to Emerson and to the many readers this book will surely attract and leave with a deeper understanding of Emerson the writer. How many of us have read through all the journals to gather his thoughts, often private, uncontained in the essays, about the actual work of turning language into the fertile body of expressed thought? As in his biography of Emerson, The Mind on Fire, we are recipients again of Richardson's scholarship, his unflagging, inquisitive, humanist unveiling of the great Emerson's thoughts."-Mary Oliver

"In this brief, elegant, and quietly passionate volume Robert Richardson has produced an invaluable handbook for the writer and aspirant writer, a copy of which should be presented to every student in every writing class around the world, for it is a serious course he is embarked on, in which he must learn to write not in the hope of expressing his puny self but to be, among other things, a guardian of language."-John Banville, The New York Review of Books

“Robert Richardson’s extraordinary knowledge of Emerson’s life and work allows him to stroll back through the marginal notes to Emerson’s complete oeuvre and distill for us the choicest liquor. Most remarkable is the volume’s organization. Such a compilation and meditation becomes virtually a new interpretive essay about Emerson as reader and writer. Richardson’s pithy prose is as engaging as the master’s. We have here something that, from its first page, will instantly delight and instruct both readers and writers. This should be a favorite among all sorts of readers: creative writers who will turn to it to see what a master thought about language and its manifold uses; prose writers who will see in Emerson’s essays timeless models for their own work; poets who will learn much about words and their fitness for the various works to which we seek to put them.”—Philip F. Gura, author, American Transcendentalism: A History

“Richardson is Emerson’s foremost biographer, and he has culled the great man’s work for the kind of specific, timeless instruction that makes the difference between good writing and great writing. This is the book on writing that Emerson would have used to teach his lucky students. The chapter on sentences sparkles, and it alone is worth the purchase. Everyone who wants to learn about writing should read this book.”—Susan Cheever, author, American Bloomsbury and Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction

"First We Read, Then We Write is enlightening. Like Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet and A. Alvarez's The Writer's Voice, it is an essential book that belongs in the hands of every impassioned writer, reader and teacher." —Dale Salwak, Times Higher Education