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Classic Authors: Ralph Waldo Emerson

© Susan Jensen

Ralph Waldo Emerson emerged into the world on May 25, 1803, in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the fourth child of William and Ruth Emerson. William, like many of his ancestors, served as a Unitarian reverend.

Emerson led a sheltered childhood, marked by the death of his father in 1811. When his father passed away, Emerson's education became the responsibility of an aunt. He would later attend Boston Public Latin School and eventually Harvard College.

In 1825, Emerson attended Harvard Divinity School. The following year, he was licensed to preach. From 1829 to 1832, he performed his duties as a Unitarian minister at Boston's Old North Church. Eventually, he left the post because of doctrinal disputes.

Emerson then launched on a trip to Europe, where he met British writers, including Carlyle, Coleridge and Wordsworth. He returned, much influenced by those he had met, and settled in Concord, Massachusetts. He began his career as a lecturer at this time.

Emerson is widely known as the father of the Transcendentalist movement in the United States. Transcendentalism, a philosophy that interested not only Emerson, but also Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and others, focused on the belief in a higher knowledge than that which can be achieved by human beings. Emerson discussed the details of the philosophy in his essay, "Nature." Although Plato developed the idea, Emerson spread it in America. From 1840 to 1844, Emerson edited the Dial, a journal which promoted Transcendental thought.

His first volume of essays, which included "Self-Reliance," "Prudence," "Heroism" and "Art,"was published in 1841. The second volume, which included "The Poet," "Manners," and "Character," appeared three years later. Emerson's poetry would not be published until 1846, when his first volume of poems appeared.

From 1847 to 1848, Emerson lectured in England; some of the speeches from that period were collected and published in Representative Men (1850). He presented his famous "The American Scholar" in 1837, and proceeded to shock Harvard's clergymen with "The Divinity School Address," in which he referred to the divinity of man and the humanity of Christ. As a result of his radical thinking, Emerson was ostracized by the university.

Early in his life, Emerson married Ellen Tucker, who died of tuberculosis 17 months later. In 1835, he married again, this time to Lydia Jackson. Together, they had four children.

By the late 1800s, Emerson had begun to fall ill. He conducted his last tour abroad from 1872 to 1873, after which he retired from public life. On April 27, 1882, Ralph Waldo Emerson died in Concord, Massachusetts, of complications from pneumonia. Two more volumes of his work were published posthumously.