Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1803. His father, a Unitarian minister, died when Ralph was seven. He entered Harvard College at fourteen and, after teaching school for a time, studied at Harvard Divinity School and became a Unitarian minister. His first wife, Ellen Tucker, died of tuberculosis in 1831, and the next year he resigned from the ministry. He travelled to Europe, where he met the writers Thomas Carlyle, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Settling in Concord, Massachusetts, he published Nature (1836), which set out the ideas of Transcendentalism, a movement that held that people could find truth through intuition and the natural world. His lecture 'The American Scholar' (1837) urged Americans to develop their own intellectual life. His Essays (1841), including 'Self-Reliance', made him one of the best-known American writers, and for decades he travelled the country as a lecturer. He was a friend and mentor to Henry David Thoreau, and he opposed slavery. He died in Concord in 1882.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Son of a Unitarian minister; he began his career as a Unitarian minister in Boston before turning to Transcendentalism. Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy