Robert D Richardson

Updated on Oct 13, 2024

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Name Robert Richardson Role Historian		Spouse Annie Dillard Education Harvard University

Awards Bancroft Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada Nominations National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography/Autobiography Books Emerson, William James: In the Maels, Henry Thoreau, First We Read - Then We, Splendor of Heart: Walter Ja Similar People Annie Dillard, Allen Mandelbaum, William James, R H W Dillard

Robert d richardson introduction by david leary and discussion

Robert D. Richardson (born 1934 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin) is an American historian, and biographer.

Robert D. Richardson wwwkwlsorgwpcontentuploads201207RobertRic

Early life

Richardson was brought up in Medford, Massachusetts and Concord, Massachusetts. He graduated from Exeter, in 1952, and from Harvard University, with a PhD.

Career

He taught at the University of Denver, Harvard University, Yale University, The University of Colorado, Queens College, City University of New York, Sichuan University, Wesleyan University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Personal life

Richardson was first married to Elizabeth Hall; they have two daughters.

He married Annie Dillard after she wrote him a fan letter about Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. They have three stepdaughters.

He is program chair for New Voices at the Key West Literary Seminar.

Awards

2007 Bancroft Prize

1990 Guggenheim Fellowship

Francis Parkman Prize

Melcher Book Award

Works

"The Enlightenment View of Myth and Joel Barlow's Vision of Columbus", Robert D. Richardson Jr.; Early American Literature, Vol. 13, 1978

Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. University of California Press. 1986. ISBN 978-0-520-05495-0.

Emerson: The Mind on Fire. University of California Press. 1996. ISBN 978-0-520-20689-2.

Burton Feldman, Robert D. Richardson, eds. (2000). The rise of modern mythology, 1680-1860. Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-20188-1. CS1 maint: Uses editors parameter (link)

William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2007. ISBN 978-0-618-91989-5.

First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process. University of Iowa Press. 2009. ISBN 978-1-58729-793-9.

Splendor of Heart: Walter Jackson Bate and the Teaching of Literature. David R. Godine, Publisher. 2013. ISBN 978-1-56792-475-6.

Reviews

In the James book he even pauses, endearingly, at a tricky philosophical intersection, and allows, “This is not easy stuff.” These are intellectual biographies, which means that Richardson attempted to read everything his subjects read—which also means that he works just as hard as these death-haunted, pressed-for-time 19th-century giants who fascinate him. It's a formidable combination. He's a writer who rewards your trust, for the same reasons we learned to trust him on those sailboats far from shore—he knows what he's doing, and because he's restless, curious and fearless, he can take you where you might never travel on your own.

To trace the subtle reciprocities between philosophizing and living is the ambitious task that Robert D. Richardson sets himself in his absorbing, if also frustrating, biography William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism.

References

Robert D. Richardson Wikipedia

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