Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803, the son of a Unitarian minister who died when he was a child. He studied at Harvard and at its Divinity School, and in 1829 became minister of the Second Church in Boston. His young wife Ellen died of tuberculosis in 1831, and in 1832 he resigned his ministry, unable in conscience to continue celebrating the Lord’s Supper.

He travelled to Europe, where he met Coleridge, Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle, and on his return settled in Concord, Massachusetts. Nature (1836), his first book, became the manifesto of Transcendentalism. His address at the Harvard Divinity School in 1838, which urged ministers to speak from their own experience of the divine, caused such offence that he was not invited back to Harvard for decades.

He made his living as a lecturer, travelling widely across the United States, and published his lectures as essays: two series of Essays (1841, 1844), Representative Men (1850) and The Conduct of Life (1860), among others. He read widely in Plato, the Neoplatonists, Swedenborg and the scriptures of India and Persia, and in 1857 published the poem “Brahma”. He spoke against slavery and the Fugitive Slave Law. In his last years his memory failed; he died in Concord in 1882.