Robert Richardson is a distinguished scholar and the author of  Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995), winner of the Frederic G. Melcher Book Award, and Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (1986), both from the University of California. William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism will appear from Houghton Mifflin this fall. Richardson is the recipient of the Francis Parkman Prize and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, among many other honors. 

Photo by David Carmack