Self-Reliance, and Other Essays

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was a renowned lecturer and writer whose ideas on philosophy, religion, and literature influenced many writers, including Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. After an undergraduate career at Harvard, he studied at Harvard Divinity School and became an ordained minister. He led the transcendentalist movement in America in the mid-nineteenth century. He is perhaps most well known for his publications Essays and Nature.