Meet the Author
Ralph Waldo Emerson
American · 1803–1882 · Essayist, lecturer, and poet
Portrait: User:Scewing derivative work: 2009, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
A Boston-born former minister who became the leading voice of American Transcendentalism through his essays and public lectures.
2 StoryBites Editions2 Speeches & essays
Why read Ralph Waldo Emerson?
Emerson wrote essays the way a lecturer speaks, in bold claims meant to wake the listener up. Self-Reliance argues that each person should trust their own mind instead of copying others, and several of its lines became proverbs. Read it for its case for nonconformity and for sentences that reward slow reading, one at a time.
A life in six dates
- 1803Born in Boston
- 1821Graduates from Harvard College
- 1832Resigns as minister of Boston’s Second Church
- 1836Publishes Nature
- 1837Delivers The American Scholar at Harvard
- 1841Publishes Essays, including Self-Reliance
- 1882Dies in Concord, Massachusetts
Themes across the collection
The StoryBites Editions
Context that actually matters
TranscendentalismThis New England movement held that truth can be known through intuition and that each person has direct access to the divine.
The lecture circuitEmerson earned much of his living as a traveling lecturer, and many of his essays began as talks.
American literary independenceIn the 1830s Emerson urged American writers to stop imitating Europe and trust their own experience.