Recipiect of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society Distinguished Achievement Award, Laura Dassow Walls writes with a depth of knowledge about Emerson himself. Emerson has traditionally been cast as a dreamer and a mystic. In Walls’s view Emerson was a leader of the secular avant-garde in his day. He helped to establish science as the popular norm of truth in America and to modernize American popular thought. In addition, he became a hero to a post-Darwinian generation of Victorian Dissenters, exemplifying the strong connection between transcendentalism and later nineteenth-century science. In this work Walls positions Emerson and his work in relation to the vibrant conversation between Science and Literature in America.