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Ralph Waldo Emerson Biography

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the founder of the Transcendentalist Movement, was a philosopher, activist, and author, as well as a guide and patron of other writers, especially his friend Henry David Thoreau. Emerson's Transcendentalism embraced some principles of Christianity, Eastern religions, and the English Romantics, but was not a subcategory of any of them; instead, it was a new, truly American philosophy, with the idea of self-reliance at its core.

Emerson was born in Boston. His father and grandfather were both Unitarian ministers, and the call to preach is clearly evident in Emerson's writing. However, he advocated a break with some of the formal teachings of the Unitarian Church. For instance, he caused an uproar while giving the graduation address at Harvard Divinity School when he disavowed the divinity of Jesus. Although Jesus was a good, insightful man who saw the truth clearly, said Emerson, Jesus was not God, and focusing on Jesus' divinity had done harm to the Church. Instead of blindly worshipping, each person should attempt to perceive the truth as clearly as Jesus had.

Emerson helped edit the magazine, The Dial, which published many Transcendentalist writings in the 1880s, and his first book of essays, Nature, (1836) was one of the most important publications of the Transcendentalists. In it, Emerson espouses the belief that human beings are connected to everything in the natural world by a common soul and states that all human beings have access to this soul through their own intuition; there is no need, he says, to get truth from books or higher authorities. He would elaborate upon this idea in Self-Reliance, his book of essays,.

Although he claimed that travel is seldom worthwhile (because any knowledge can be gained at home), Emerson did travel to several continents, and he crossed America as a lecturer. While in England, he met several important poets of the Romantic Movement, including William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Their writing, like Emerson's, stressed the importance of individual intuition and the importance of finding solace in the natural world.

Emerson was married twice; his first wife, however, died of tuberculosis at the age of nineteen. With his second wife, Lidia (he called her Lidian), he had five children. The oldest, Waldo, died of scarlet fever at the age of five, and both parents suffered great emotional stress because of it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson died from pneumonia on April 27, 1882. The bells in Concord rang 79 times—one for each year of his life.