Energy and Economy in American Literature

This study illuminates the formation of a vital, new idiom of 'energy' and 'economy' in America's industrial heartland in the nineteenth century. Ackerman's vivid account of mythmaking and material production will interest anyone who cares about intellectual, cultural, and economic history, fossil fuels and the rise of ecological thought.

This ambitious history of industrial and cultural revolution illuminates the formation of a new idiom of energy and economy in nineteenth-century America. In 1851, Ralph Waldo Emerson made an arduous journey to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There, in a series of lectures, he articulated modern ideas of industrial power, the soul's economy, and a value system premised on a new set of prime movers, fossil fuels. Emerson asked a practical question: 'How shall I live?' His response was to create a mythic language centered on the energy-and-economy dialectic. This book vividly shows how other authors, from Catharine Beecher, who laid the groundwork for the environmental canon, and W. E. B. Du Bois, who poeticized labor, to Henry Adams and Edith Wharton, as well as conservationists, homemakers, and coal miners, built on Emerson's 'practical question' to give fresh purpose to human existence in a radically altered world.