Ralph Waldo Emerson
American essayist and Transcendentalist
Ralph Waldo Emerson was a 19th-century American essayist, lecturer and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement. He wrote the essay Self-Reliance.
1 summary 6 min of listening
American Born 1803 in Boston Died 1882
Influenced by Henry David Thoreau, Thomas Carlyle
About Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803 and died in 1882. He studied at Harvard and the Cambridge Divinity School, then became a Unitarian minister in 1826. By 1832 he had left Unitarianism, and after a year in Europe he returned to the United States in 1833 to work as a poet, writer and lecturer. His 1836 essay Nature set out the philosophy of Transcendentalism, and his 1837 speech "The American Scholar" followed. Self-Reliance appeared in his first collection, Essays: First Series (1841), alongside "The Over-Soul" and "Circles". He was also a close friend and mentor to fellow transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau.