When Carlos Baker died in 1987, he had completed all but the finishing touches on what will be considered his masterpiece. An esteemed literary critic and mentor to several generations of younger scholars, Carlos Baker had a lifelong interest in the writers of the American Renaissance, particularly in Ralph Waldo Emerson, its intellectual centerpiece, but also in Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Amos Bronson Alcott, and Margaret Fuller, all...