I title this essay “Six Characters in Search of a Prophet”; it might equally have been called “Six Aspects of a Problem in Search of a Solution.” Prefaced by the introductory “Uses of Great Men,” delivered as a course of lectures in the winter of 1845–46, and enlarged and revised only slightly for book publication in 1850, Representative Men belongs in its thematic concerns to the earlier half of the decade, a period of crisis and would-be transition for Emerson most openly on display the preceding year in “Experience” (1844) but visible as well in attitudes toward nature, history, and the capacities of the self in “The Method of Nature” (1841), “The Transcendentalist” (1841), “The Young American” (1844), and in contemporary volumes of the journals.1
Among the most accessible of Emerson's books, if also among the least attended to critically, Representative Men occupies the position of a fulcrum,...