About Author

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882), who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, minister, abolitionist, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, "Nature". His speech "The American Scholar," given in 1837, was called America's "intellectual Declaration of Independence" by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures and then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays, Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844), represent the core of his thinking. He remains among the linchpins of the American romantic movement, and his work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers, and poets that followed him.