Ralph Waldo Emerson

Their life

The sage of Concord — essayist and lecturer who left the pulpit to preach self-reliance from the lyceum stage instead. Self-Reliance, Nature, and hundreds of lectures across decades made him America’s public philosopher of inner authority; his journals, kept for fifty-five years, were the workshop. He mentored Thoreau, championed unpopular causes, and rebuilt his thinking after every grief.

Known for

• Essay "Self-Reliance"
• Nature (1836)
• Founding voice of Transcendentalism
• "The American Scholar" address
• Decades of lyceum lecturing
• Mentor to Henry David Thoreau

The road they walked

Emerson was born in Boston in 1803, the fourth of eight children in a family that had supplied Massachusetts with Congregational and Unitarian ministers for generations. His father, a Unitarian clergyman, died when Ralph was seven, leaving his mother and an aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, to raise the children on thin means and thick learning. Harvard came next, then Harvard's Divinity School, and by 1829 Emerson was ordained and settled as junior pastor of Boston's Second Church — following the family trade, as expected.

That trade didn't hold. In 1831 his young wife Ellen Tucker died of tuberculosis after less than two years of marriage, a loss that shook him badly, and by 1832 he found he could no longer in good conscience administer the Lord's Supper as his congregation required. He resigned the pulpit, sailed for Europe, and came back changed — he'd met Wordsworth, Coleridge, and, most consequentially, Thomas Carlyle, with whom he'd correspond for the rest of his life. Settling in Concord, Massachusetts, remarried to Lydia Jackson, Emerson found his real vocation not behind an altar but in front of a lyceum crowd, and gathered around him a loose circle — Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Hawthorne down the road — that would come to be called the Transcendentalists.

What made him a public philosopher rather than a private eccentric was sheer output and range: an 1836 pamphlet called Nature that laid out the movement's premises, an 1837 Phi Beta Kappa address ('The American Scholar') that Oliver Wendell Holmes called America's intellectual declaration of independence, and a Harvard Divinity School address the following year so unorthodox in its view of Christ that Harvard didn't invite him back for decades. Grief kept revisiting him — his five-year-old son Waldo died of scarlet fever in 1842 — and each time he wrote his way back into the world, filling notebooks that eventually ran to some 260 volumes. He toured constantly, delivering hundreds of lectures across the Northeast and Midwest for over three decades, turning that itinerant preaching into the essays — Self-Reliance, Circles, The Over-Soul — that made him, by mid-century, the closest thing America had to a national sage.

How their story ended

Emerson died in Concord in 1882 of pneumonia, at the end of a slow decline in which his memory and command of language had been failing for several years — a condition contemporaries called senility and which some later historians have suspected was Alzheimer's disease, though no certain diagnosis exists. He had stopped lecturing and could barely recall his own writings, yet friends noted he remained gentle and largely untroubled by the loss. He was buried in Concord's Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, on the hillside near Thoreau and Hawthorne, in a spot that had already become a kind of literary pilgrimage site in his lifetime.