Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, lithograph by Leopold Grozelier, 1859

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Arts & Culture

Ralph Waldo Emerson

American author

Written and fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: Feb 29, 2024 • Article History

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Category: Arts & Culture

Born:: May 25, 1803, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.

Died:: April 27, 1882, Concord, Massachusetts (aged 78)

Awards And Honors:: Hall of Fame (1900)

Notable Works:: “Address at Divinity College”; “English Traits”; “Essays”; “Nature”; “Poems”; “Representative Men”; “Self-Reliance”; “The American Scholar”; “The Conduct of Life”

Movement / Style:: American Renaissance; Transcendentalism

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Ralph Waldo Emerson (born May 25, 1803, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.—died April 27, 1882, Concord, Massachusetts) was an American lecturer, poet, and essayist, the leading exponent of New England Transcendentalism. Emerson was the son of the Reverend William Emerson, a Unitarian clergyman and friend of the arts. The son inherited the profession of divinity, which had attracted all his ancestors in direct line from Puritan days. The family of his mother, Ruth Haskins, was strongly Anglican, and among influences on Emerson were such Anglican writers and thinkers as Ralph Cudworth, Robert Leighton, Jeremy Taylor, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. On May 12, ...(100 of 1652 words)

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