Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803. His father, a minister, died when he was eight, and his mother raised the children by keeping a boarding house. He entered Harvard College at fourteen and after graduating became a minister. When he was twenty-eight his young wife died of tuberculosis; he fell into deep doubt, resigned his ministry the following year and travelled in Europe, where he met Coleridge, Wordsworth and Carlyle. On his return he settled in Concord and lived by lecturing and writing, giving thousands of lectures across the country. He was the leader of the Transcendentalist movement, and his Harvard address 'The American Scholar' has been called America's intellectual declaration of independence. Thoreau was his disciple and friend, and Whitman said: 'I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil.'