This is the best of Emerson's later works, qualifying his earlier popular essays, series one and two, with the heavier hand of experience. The Conduct of Life ostensibly is a set of essays about how to live life but also is an amalgam of what life taught Emerson.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century.