Emerson

Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Emerson graduated from Harvard University at the age of 18 and for the next three years taught school in Boston. In 1825 he entered Harvard Divinity School, and the next year he was certified to preach by the Middlesex Association of Ministers. Even with ill health, Emerson delivered occasional lecture in churches in the Boston area. In 1829 he became minister of the Second Church (Unitarian) of Boston. That same year he married Ellen Tucker, who died 17 months later. On Christmas Day, 1832, he left the United States for a tour of Europe. He stayed for some time in England, where he made the associate of such British literary notables as Walter Savage Landor, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, and William Wordsworth. His meeting with Carlyle marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship.

On his return to the United States in 1833, Emerson settled in Concord, Massachusetts, and became active as a lecturer in Boston. His lectures including “The Philosophy of History,” “Human Culture,” “Human Life,” and “The Present Age” were based on material in his Journals (published posthumously, 1909-1914), a collection of comments and notes that he had begun while a student at Harvard. Emerson applied these ideas to cultural and logical problems in his 1837 lecture “The American Scholar,” which he delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard. In it he called for American intellectual independence. A second address, commonly referred to as the “Address at Divinity College,” delivered in 1838 to the graduating class of Cambridge Divinity College, produce great controversy because it attacked formal religion and argued for self-reliance and unconscious spiritual experience.

The first volume of Emerson's Essays (1841) includes some of his most popular works. It contains History, Self-Reliance, Compensation, Spiritual Laws, Love, Friendship, Prudence, Heroism, The Over-Soul, Circles, Intellect, and Art. The second series of Essays (1844) includes “The Poet,” “Manners,” and “Character.” In it Emerson tempered the hopefulness of the first volume of essays, placing less importance on the self and acknowledging the limitations of real life. Emerson succeeded her as editor in 1842 and remained