Emerson & Shawn

It was on this day in 1837 that Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered a speech entitled "The American Scholar" to the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard University. Emerson was actually filling in for the orator Reverend Dr. Wainwright, who had backed out of the speaking engagement at the last minute. But Emerson used the occasion to explain his transcendentalist philosophy for the first time in front of a large public audience. He said that scholars had become too obsessed with ideas of the past, that they were bookworms rather than thinkers. He told the audience to break from the past, to pay attention to the present, and to create their own new, unique ideas.
Emerson said, "Life is our dictionary. ... This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it. ... I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds."
The speech was published that same year. It made Emerson famous, and it brought the ideas of transcendentalism to young men like Henry David Thoreau. Oliver Wendell Holmes called "The American Scholar," "[the] intellectual Declaration of Independence."
It's the birthday of the second editor of The New Yorker magazine, William Shawn, born in Chicago, Illinois (1907). He started out contributing short pieces for the "Talk of the Town" section of The New Yorker when he was a young reporter in New Mexico. The magazine eventually hired him, and he worked his way up to the position of managing editor, and finally took over as editor from Harold Ross in 1952. He helped turn The New Yorker into a magazine of serious journalism. He was known to give writers more time to produce their pieces and more space in the magazine than any other magazine editor in the country.
He was squeamish about violence in fiction. He once decided not to publish an article about fishing because he didn't like the idea of killing fish. He also disliked air conditioning, was rarely photographed, didn't give interviews, and even after he became editor of The New Yorker, never once gave a speech in public. He was exceedingly polite and even people who had known him for years still called him Mr. Shawn. And he was a stickler for detail. He read every story three times before it was published in the magazine.
Four days before he died, Shawn had lunch with Lillian Ross, and she showed him a book cover blurb she had written and asked if he would check it. She later wrote of that day, "He took out the mechanical pencil he always carried in his inside jacket pocket, and ... made his characteristically neat proofreading marks on a sentence that said 'the book remains as fresh and unique as ever.' He changed it to read, 'remains unique and as fresh as ever.' 'There are no degrees of uniqueness,' Mr. Shawn said politely."