Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson founded Transcendentalism and did more than anyone to give American literature an independent voice. Born in Boston in 1803, the son of a Unitarian minister who died when he was eight, he grew up in genteel poverty, attended Harvard, and became a Unitarian minister himself. His first wife Ellen died of tuberculosis in 1831, seventeen months after their marriage, and he visited her tomb and opened the coffin. In 1832 he resigned his pulpit, unable to administer communion with conviction, and travelled to Europe, where he met Coleridge, Wordsworth and Carlyle, beginning a lifelong friendship with the last. He settled in Concord, Massachusetts, and published Nature anonymously in 1836. It argues that truth is available directly through individual intuition and the observation of the natural world, without the mediation of churches, institutions or the past — the founding statement of Transcendentalism. His 1837 Phi Beta Kappa address, The American Scholar, called for an American intellectual life independent of Europe; Oliver Wendell Holmes called it an intellectual declaration of independence. His 1838 Divinity School Address, denying the miracles and calling for direct religious experience, was so unwelcome that Harvard did not invite him back for thirty years. Self-Reliance in 1841 contains his most quoted lines, including that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. He made his living as a lecturer on the lyceum circuit, travelling constantly, and supported Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott and, belatedly, Walt Whitman. He was slow to commit to abolitionism and became outspoken after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. He died in 1882 with his memory largely gone.

• Lived: 1803 CE – 1882 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: philosopher, poet, writer