This article seeks to interpret the ubiquitous presence of the inventor in Emerson’s writings. What power(s) is this figure endowed with—historical and social as much as poetic and philosophical—for Emerson to write that “one must be an inventor to read well”, or that “only an inventor knows how to borrow”? These paradoxes highlight moments of special energy in the essays, where the (practical) model of the inventor serves to typify the (moral and intellectual) virtue of the scholar. But Emerson’s constantly ambiguous assimilation to the figure of the inventor is also a way of staging the experience of writing as turning the private into the public, and as an exercise in democratic “borrowing”.

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