Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American lecturer, philosopher, essayist, and poet. He led the transcendentalist movement (belief in the inherent goodness of people and nature) of the mid-19th century and propagated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and over 1,500 public lectures across the United States.
Emerson formulated and expressed his philosophy of transcendentalism in his 1836 essay “Nature.” The next year, he gave a speech entitled “The American Scholar” which acclaimed writer Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. regarded to be the United States’ “Intellectual Declaration of Independence.”
Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844) are his first two collections of essays and represent the core of his thinking. The collections include his well-known essays “Self-Reliance”, “Circles”, “The Poet”, “The Over-Soul”, and “Experience.”
Emerson is among the linchpins of the American romantic movement. His work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that followed him including the likes of Nietzsche, William James, Walt Whitman, and Henry David Thoreau.
In 1900, Harvard named a building, Emerson Hall, after him.