Mehdi Aminrazavi is Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Mary Washington. He is the author of The Wine of Wisdom: The Life, Poetry, and Philosophy of Omar Khayyam and the coeditor (with David Ambuel) of Philosophy, Religion, and the Question of Intolerance, also published by SUNY Press.

Foreword
Jacob Needleman

Introduction
Mehdi Aminrazavi

The English Romantic Background

1. English Romantics and Persian Sufi Poets: a wellspring of Inspiration for American Transcendentalists
Leonard Lewisohn

The Master: Emerson and Sufism

2. The Chronological Development of Emerson's Interest in Persian Mysticism
Mansur Ekhtiyar

3. Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Muslim Orient
Marwan M. Obeidat

4. Emerson and Aspects of Sa'di's Reception in Nineteenth-Century America
Parvin Loloi

5. Emerson on Hafiz and Sa'di: The Narrative of Love and Wine
Farhang Jahanpour

The Disciple: Walt Whitman

6. Whitman and Hafiz: Expressions of Universal Love and Tolerance
Mahnaz Ahmad

7. Walt Whitman and Sufism: Towards "A Persian Lesson"
Massud Farzan

The Initiates: Other American Authors

8. Literary "Masters" in the Literature of Thomas Lake Harris, Lawrence Oliphant, and Paschal Beverly Randolph
Arthur Versluis

9. American Transcendentalists' Interpretations of Sufism: Thoreau, Whitman, Longfellow, Lowell, Melville, and Lafcadio Hearn
John D. Yohannan

10. The Persians of Concord
Phillip N. Edmondson

11. Omarian Poets of America
Mehdi Aminrazavi

12. "Bond Slave to FitzGerald's Omar": Mark Twain and The Rubáiyát
Alan Gribben

13. Mark Twain's Ruba'iyyat: AGE-A Rubáiyát

Glossary
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index