Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the most influential American writers and philosophers of the 19th century. His father, a descendant of the Puritans, was a Unitarian pastor, and his mother was a devout Anglican. It was perhaps inevitable, then, that Emerson gravitated toward divinity: after graduating from Harvard College in 1821, and studying at Harvard Divinity School, he was ordained as a Unitarian minister at Boston’s Second Church in 1829. His young wife’s early death from tuberculosis in 1831 drove him to question his Christian faith and eventually to leave the ministry in 1832. He traveled to Europe, meeting many of the leading thinkers and artists of the era, including Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle. In 1834, Emerson took up permanent residence in Concord, Massachusetts, which would be his home for the rest of his life. Soon after, in 1836, he published Nature, his philosophical manifesto and a core text for the movement that would form around him, called Transcendentalism, which emphasized the mysterious presence of the divine in nature. In 1840, he helped Margaret Fuller and others found The Dial, a Transcendentalist journal, and in 1841 and 1844, respectively, he collected and published two volumes, or “series,” of his Essays; “Experience” was published in the second series. Throughout the following decades, Emerson enjoyed widespread literary fame and traveled across the country delivering lectures. By the time of his death, in 1883, he was known as the Sage of Concord, canonized—perhaps somewhat ironically, for someone who began as a radical—among the greats personalities of American culture.