Joel Porte is Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters at Cornell University, where he has taught since 1987. He is the author of In Respect to Egotism: Studies in American Romantic Writing; Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time; and The Romance of America: Studies in Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James. He is editor, with Saundra Morris, of The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson.