In July of 1832, Ralph Waldo Emerson had come to a critical pass. He was on the brink of leaving his career as a minister, had lost his wife and lost his way. In this reduced state he traveled to New Hampshire, where, at the Notch of the White Mountains, he made his famous decision to pursue wholeness - in his life and in his writing. The Emerson Museum reveals how Emerson went about achieving this purpose - and how, in doing so, he conceived a uniquely American literary practice.

The Emerson Museum shows how this undertaking transformed the legacy of European romanticism into a writing project answerable to American urgencies. The natural science of the time was itself informed by romantic demands for wholeness of prospect, and its methods offered Emerson a way to confront an American reality in which any manifestation of unity - literary, political, philosophical, psychological - had to embrace an expanding and fragmenting field of objective elements.

In the experimental format of Emerson's essay, Brown identifies the evolution of this new approach and the emergence of wholeness as a national literary project.