1803-1882 · American essayist, lecturer, and poet of New England Transcendentalism
About Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was an American essayist, lecturer and poet from Boston who settled in Concord, Massachusetts. Trained at Harvard and ordained a Unitarian minister, he resigned his Boston pulpit in 1832, published Nature in 1836, and became the leading voice of New England Transcendentalism through lectures such as The American Scholar (1837) and the Divinity School Address (1838). Essays: First Series (1841) was his first major collection.
Essays: First Series gathers twelve essays that Emerson worked up from his journals and from the lecture courses he gave in Boston in the late 1830s. Each pursues one idea through a rush of aphorisms, examples and images rather than a step-by-step argument, and together they set out his conviction that the same universal mind or soul speaks in every person and in nature.