Ralph Waldo Emerson

In 1832, Ralph Waldo Emerson resigned his pulpit at Boston’s Second Church because he could not in good conscience administer communion — the ritual required, in his view, a theological claim he no longer believed. He was twenty-nine, recently widowed, and giving up a secure position in the most respectable profession available to a man of his education. The act of intellectual honesty set the tone for everything that followed.

• Born: May 25, 1803, Boston, Massachusetts
• Died: April 27, 1882, Concord, Massachusetts (age 78)
• Era: American Transcendentalism; American Renaissance
• Major works: Nature (1836), “Self-Reliance” (essay, 1841), “The American Scholar” (address, 1837), Representative Men (1850), The Conduct of Life (1860)
• Mentor to Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman; tireless lecturer on the American circuit for over thirty years

His first wife, Ellen Tucker, died of tuberculosis in 1831 after less than two years of marriage. She was nineteen. Emerson grieved in the way he did everything — by thinking through it, by writing into it. He visited her tomb almost daily for over a year. The loss and the questions it forced seem to have cracked something open in his thinking about mortality, the self, and what actually survives. Nature, his first major essay and the founding document of American Transcendentalism, was published five years later.

His 1841 essay “Self-Reliance” is one of the most quoted documents in American culture: a sustained argument that conformity is a slow death, that the individual’s deepest intuitions are more reliable than inherited opinion, and that the person who defers to society rather than their own honest judgment is not being humble but cowardly. This was not a popular argument in 1841. It remains a difficult one to follow.

He was also practically capable in ways his reputation sometimes obscures. He managed his finances carefully, ran a highly successful national lecture circuit, helped fund Thoreau’s time at Walden Pond, and served as a generous mentor to writers whose reputations eventually exceeded his own. He was an opponent of slavery at a time when many of his peers found the question politically inconvenient.

One note on misattribution: the line “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” is not Emerson’s. It is Muriel Strode’s, from a 1903 poem. It has been given to him so persistently that the correction needs stating plainly.

For the original thinkers — the ones who need permission to trust themselves, and who find, in Emerson, that the permission was always theirs to give.