Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) was an American essayist, poet, and champion of individualism and freedom of thought. From a religious family, he became a pastor but gradually moved away from spiritual beliefs to the philosophy of transcendentalism, as expressed in his 1836 essay “Nature.” Other influential works include “The Poet” and “Self-Reliance,” essays containing the pithy epigrams for which he was so well-known. Emerson encouraged and inspired many American writers, among them Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, whom he considered his closest friend.
WORKS THAT HAVE APPEARED IN NARRATIVE:
- Self-Reliance and Other Virtues, a feature, in Stories of the Week: 2019–2020