ABSTRACT
Harvard College is celebrated as a bastion of left liberalism where students are formally encouraged to be free thinkers who question intellectual orthodoxy. If Harvard College was by turns vacant and oppressive in its pedagogy, it also offered itself to young Oliver Wendell Holmes as a dragon of sorts that he could dent and kick a stuffy ogre against which he could exert his coltish manliness. What Holmes as a college student found thrilling about Emerson was his call for intellectual self-reliance–an antithesis of patriarchy–as the most noble expression of manliness. The reader finds in the undergraduate writings of Holmes an unwavering admiration for the precept that one should never defer reflexively to receive authorities, and that one should endeavor instead to discern for one's self what is true. So enamored was the college-aged Holmes by Emerson's "Books" essay that he penned an essay, also titled "Books," and, there, Holmes introduced the same themes as did Emerson.
