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. He was seen as a champion of individualism and critical thinking, as well as a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society and conformity. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche thought he was "the most gifted of the Americans", and Walt Whitman called Emerson his "master".
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. They include the well-known essays "Self-Reliance", "The Over-Soul", "Circles", "The Poet", and "Experience". Together with "Nature", these essays made the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period.
Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets. He instead developed ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for mankind to achieve almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. Emerson's conception of "nature" was more philosophical than naturalistic: "Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul." He was one of several major figures who "took a more pantheist or pandeist approach, by rejecting views of God as separate from the world".
Emerson remains among the linchpins of the American romantic movement, and his work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers, and poets that followed him. "In all my lectures," he wrote, "I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man." Emerson is also well-known as a mentor and close friend of his fellow Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau.
Early life, family, and education
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 25, 1803, to Ruth Haskins and the Rev. William Emerson, a Unitarian minister. He was named after his mother's brother Ralph and his father's great-grandmother, Rebecca Waldo. He was the second of five sons who survived into adulthood; the others were William, Edward, Robert Bulkeley, and Charles. Three other children—Phoebe, John Clarke, and Mary Caroline—died in childhood. Emerson was of English ancestry, and his family had lived in New England since the early colonial period, with Ralph Waldo being a seventh-generation descendant of Mayflower voyagers John Howland and Elizabeth Tilley through their daughter Hope.
Emerson's father died from stomach cancer on May 12, 1811, less than two weeks before young Ralph's eighth birthday. He was raised by his mother, with the help of the other women in the family. His aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, in particular, had a profound effect on him. She lived with the family on and off, and maintained a constant correspondence with Emerson until her death in 1863.
Emerson's formal schooling began at the Boston Latin School in 1812, when he was nine years old. In October 1817, at age 14, Emerson entered Harvard College, where he was appointed freshman messenger for the college president, requiring him to fetch delinquent students and deliver messages to faculty. Midway through his junior year, Emerson began keeping a list of books he had read and started a journal in a series of notebooks that would be called "Wide World". He took outside jobs to cover his school expenses, including as a waiter for the Junior Commons and as an occasional teacher working with his uncle Samuel and aunt Sarah Ripley in Waltham, Massachusetts.
By his senior year at Harvard, Emerson decided to go by his middle name, Waldo. He served as Class Poet, and as was the custom, he presented an original poem on Harvard's Class Day, a month before his official graduation on August 29, 1821, when he was 18. He did not stand out as a student, graduating in the exact middle of his class of 59 students.
In the early 1820s, Emerson worked as a teacher at the School for Young Ladies (which was run by his brother William). He next spent two years living in a cabin in the Canterbury section of Roxbury, Massachusetts, where he wrote and studied nature. In his honor, this area is now called Schoolmaster Hill in Boston's Franklin Park.
In 1826, faced with poor health, Emerson left Massachusetts to seek a warmer climate. He first went to Charleston, South Carolina, but found the weather was still too cold. He then journeyed further south to St. Augustine, Florida, where he took long walks on the beach and began writing poetry. In St. Augustine Emerson made the acquaintance of Achille Murat, a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, who was two years his senior. Murat and Emerson enjoyed each other's company and became good friends. The two engaged in enlightening discussions of religion, society, philosophy, and government, and Emerson considered Murat an important figure in his intellectual development.
While in St. Augustine, Emerson had his first encounter with the slave trade. At one point, he attended a meeting of the Bible Society while a slave auction was taking place in the yard outside. Writing of the incident, he remarked, "One ear therefore heard the glad tidings of great joy, whilst the other was regaled with 'Going, gentlemen, going!'"
After Harvard, Emerson assisted his brother William at a school for young women they established in their mother's house, after Waldo had established his own school in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. When William went to Göttingen in Germany to study law in mid-1824, Ralph Waldo closed the school, but continued to teach in Cambridge, Massachusetts, until early 1825. Emerson was accepted into the Harvard Divinity School in late 1824, and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa in 1828.
Emerson's brother Edward, two years younger than Waldo, entered the law office of Daniel Webster, after graduating from Harvard first in his class. Edward's physical health began to deteriorate, and he soon suffered a mental collapse as well; he was taken to McLean Asylum in June 1828 at age 25. Although he recovered his mental equilibrium, he died in 1834, apparently from long-standing tuberculosis. Another of Emerson's bright and promising younger brothers, Charles, born in 1808, died in 1836, also of tuberculosis, making him the third young person in Emerson's innermost circle to die in a period of a few years.
Emerson met his first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker, in Concord, New Hampshire, on Christmas Day, 1827, and married her two years later, when she was 18. The couple moved to Boston, and Emerson's mother, Ruth, moved with them to help take care of Ellen, who was already ill with tuberculosis.
Boston's Second Church invited Emerson to serve as its junior pastor, and he was ordained on January 11, 1829. His initial salary was $1,200 per year (equivalent to $36,281 in 2025), increasing to $1,400 in July. Along with his church role, Emerson took on other responsibilities: he served as the chaplain of the Massachusetts Legislature, and was a member of the Boston School Committee. His church activities kept him busy during this period, and facing the imminent death of his wife, he began to doubt his own beliefs.
Ellen Emerson died on February 8, 1831, at age 20, after uttering her last words, "I have not forgotten the peace and joy." Emerson was deeply affected by her death, and visited her grave in Roxbury daily. In a journal entry dated March 29, 1832, he wrote, "I visited Ellen's tomb & opened the coffin."