Biography

It is difficult to imagine the United States without Ralph Waldo Emerson. Matthew Arnold judged his essays “the most important work done in prose” in the nineteenth century, and Emerson's influence is fully evident throughout American literature. In philosophy, he can be read as lending support to or anticipating – despite the obvious contradictions – Kantian idealism, pragmatism, ordinary language philosophy, and post-modernism. He had a powerful effect on early political theorists as well as on many current ones, and in practical politics he became a leading voice for the abolition of slavery. His environmental interests inspired the school of Pre-Raphaelite painters and the landscape architects who made nature central to urban planning. Emerson, Harold Bloom suggests, is responsible for the one true American religion – that of self-reliance.

Raised in a family deeply rooted in Massachusetts, Emerson followed a time-honored path to Harvard College and the ministry. He was installed in 1829 at Second Church when Boston's Trinitarian Congregationalism was making the transition to a liberal faith that had just received the name of Unitarianism. But, declaring that he could not administer rites that portrayed Jesus as divine, Emerson soon surrendered his pulpit. After a trip to Europe in which he met Thomas Carlyle (with whom he would subsequently be closely linked), he settled into his ancestral home of nearby Concord and began developing into America's first public intellectual.

Emerson could sustain himself as an independent thinker because of the newly formed lyceum movement. Lyceums had the declared intention of offering utilitarian knowledge to the upwardly mobile, but Emerson saw it as an opportunity to promote his inchoate philosophical ideas. Yet even as he began making a good living through public speaking, he despaired over the lack of spiritual reward.