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Born in 1803 in Boston, Massachusetts, Ralph Waldo Emerson seemed predestined to become an American thought leader. After growing up steeped in religion and education — his father was not only a Unitarian minister but also a founder of early literary and philosophy clubs — Emerson started at Harvard College at 14 years old. After graduating, he eventually followed in his father’s footsteps and became ordained as a minister, but the confines of traditional religion quickly grew stifling. After the death of his first wife, Ellen Tucker, in 1831, he resigned from the church. He took time instead to travel to Europe, meeting influential minds such as Romantic poet William Wordsworth and writer Thomas Carlyle, both of whom inspired the next phase of Emerson’s career.

After returning to the U.S. in 1833, Emerson settled in Concord, Massachusetts, and began his fruitful career as a philosophical lecturer and writer. His 1836 essay “Nature” became one of his best-known works and the cornerstone of transcendentalist philosophy, a belief in the inherent divinity of individuals and nature. In the mid-19th century, Emerson’s works such as “Self-Reliance” and the speech-turned-essay “The American Scholar” championed individuality, nonconformity, and intellectual independence. With other notable New England transcendentalists of the time, including Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott, Emerson helped shape movements for racial equality, women’s rights, and environmental conservation in America.

For the last two decades of his life, Emerson’s health declined, but his impact as one of America’s leading intellectual minds remained. He encouraged people to look both inward for truth and outward to the world’s beauty, and to embrace a diversity of ideas, including European and Eastern philosophies. Emerson died in 1882 at age 78.