My Friend, My Friend: The Story of Thoreau's Relationship with Emerson - Hardcover

An account of the intense, shifting friendship between Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Harmon Smith emphasizes their personal bond, but also shows how the relationship affected their thought and writing, and was in turn influenced by their careers.

Henry David Thoreau was a twenty-year-old scholarship student at Harvard when he met Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1837. Emerson, fourteen years Thoreau's senior and independently wealthy, had recently shaken the intellectual world of New England with the publication of Nature. Despite the disparity in their circumstances, Thoreau and Emerson quickly formed a close relationship that lasted until Thoreau's death at the age of forty-four.