Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet whose 50-year writing career produced one of the foundational documents of 19th-century American Transcendentalist movement — particularly his 1836 essay Nature, his 1841 first essay collection Essays (which contained "Self-Reliance" and "The Over-Soul"), and his 1844 second essay collection Essays: Second Series. He was born Ralph Waldo Emerson on May 25, 1803, in Boston, Massachusetts. His father William Emerson was a Boston Unitarian minister at the First Church of Boston, and his mother Ruth Haskins Emerson was a homemaker. The 1811 sudden death of his father from stomach cancer — when Ralph was eight — left his mother to raise her six surviving children alone.

His education at the Boston Latin School (1812–1817) and Harvard College (B.A., 1821) launched his early-career path. His 1821–1825 New England school-teaching career and his subsequent 1826 Harvard Divinity School enrollment produced his early-career path as a Boston-area Unitarian minister. His March 1829 ordination as the junior pastor at the Second Church of Boston — and his subsequent September 1832 resignation from the Second Church (substantially produced by his theological objection to the Christian-Communion ritual administration) — produced his early-career religious-vocation conclusion.

His 1832–1833 Europe travels — particularly his Edinburgh, Scotland, meeting with Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle (which produced their lifelong correspondence and friendship) — shaped his subsequent American Transcendentalist intellectual public profile. His 1834 relocation to Concord, Massachusetts, and his subsequent 1834 marriage to Lidian Jackson, produced his 1830s and 1840s Concord-based intellectual public profile.

His 1836 anonymous publication of Nature — a 95-page philosophical essay that proposed nature as the foundation of human spiritual experience — launched his 19th-century American Transcendentalist public profile. The 1841 publication of his first essay collection Essays — which contained "Self-Reliance" (his philosophical essay on individual non-conformity, with the foundational lines "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string" and "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds") — produced his 1840s American international public profile. His later 1850s and 1860s philosophical-lecture career across multiple American Lyceum lecture-circuit engagements extended his American philosophical-essay public profile. He died on April 27, 1882, at age 78, in Concord, Massachusetts, of pneumonia.

His name Ralph derives from the Old Germanic root meaning "counsel-wolf." Ralph was a popular American boys' name through the early-to-mid-20th century.