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.

‘Energy and Economy in American Literature is an arresting reappraisal of the new energy humanities by means of a cultural history of the heyday of American industrialization.'

Lawrence Buell - Harvard University, author of The Environmental Imagination, Writing for an Endangered World, and The Future of Environmental Criticism

‘Energy and Economy in American Literature is a probing inquiry into the dialectic that drives modernity: between energy, that intangible, liberating force that drives the world, and economy, the material limits that threaten to end the world we are so busy building. Ackerman raises more questions than he answers in this extraordinary book – and that is one of its many virtues. A rare book to think through and revisit as we move ever farther into the wild world in its pages.'

Laura Dassow Walls - Author of Emerson's Life in Science: The Culture of Truth and Henry David Thoreau: A Life

‘Alan Ackerman's terrific Energy and Economy in American Literature is bursting with fresh and important insights. This important book models exciting new ways of reading for energy and environment.'

Jamie Jones - University of Illinois, Associate Professor in English