He chronicled the lives of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James.
Robert D. Richardson, a prizewinning biographer who chronicled the lives of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James, reconstructing their intellectual development in part through an unconventional method — devouring almost everything they had ever read, from Persian poetry to abolitionist tracts — died June 16 at a hospital in Hyannis, Mass. He was 86.His wife, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard, said the cause was complications from a fall.
“Aside from his learning, which is prodigious,” Banville continued, “Richardson writes a wonderfully fluent, agile prose; he has a poet’s sense of nuance and a novelist’s grasp of dramatic rhythm; he also displays a positive genius for apt quotation, the result of a total immersion in the work of his three very dissimilar yet subtly complementary thinkers. Can there be any more exciting critical writing than this?”Mr.
He began reading Thoreau more seriously while teaching American literature in Denver, where he found himself moved by the author’s descriptions of muskrats and other wildlife in the nature classic “Walden,” chronicling a year spent living near a pond outside Concord, Mass. “a virtual intellectual genealogy of American liberalism and, indeed, of American intellectual life in general.”The first of three sons, Robert Dale Richardson III was born in Milwaukee on June 14, 1934, and later joked of petitioning to change his birth date because it matched President Trump’s. Despite his birth name, he used the name Robert Jr. for many of his books, apparently because he thought it sounded less pretentious.
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