Wesley T. Mott is Professor of English at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He organized the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society in 1989. Author of “The Strains of Eloquence”: Emerson and His Sermons (Penn State, 1989), he edited volume 4 of The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Missouri, 1992) as well as several reference works, including Biographical Dictionary of Transcendentalism and Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism (both Greenwood, 1996) and the three-volume American Renaissance in New England (Gale, 2000-2001). Most recently editor of Ralph Waldo Emerson in Context (Cambridge, 2014), he is also an editor of the Journal in the Princeton Edition of The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau. He has been an officer and/or board member of the Emerson Society, Thoreau Society, Louisa May Alcott Society, and Walden Woods Project.