Although never a wealthy man, Emerson was able to support himself and his family (he remarried in 1835 and had four children) through his writing and career as a speaker. In 18 he collected his scattered essays-some of which had been published in The Dial, a Transcendentalist journal Emerson founded with Margaret Fuller-into two “series.” “Friendship” was published in the first. That philosophy became one of the central tenets of the movement known as Transcendentalism. His first book, Nature, was published in 1836, in which he sang of a mystical philosophy of nature that he would continue to unfold for the rest of his career.

He returned to Massachusetts in 1834 and settled in Concord, where he got to work on the writings that would make him famous. After only three years, however, shaken by his wife’s premature death from tuberculosis, Emerson quit the church and traveled to Europe, where he encountered many of the great poets and philosophers of the day, most notably Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle. After studies at the Boston Latin School, Harvard College (where Emerson matriculated at the tender age of 14), and the Harvard Divinity School, Emerson followed his father’s footsteps and was ordained as a minister in 1829. His father was a Unitarian minister and his mother was a religious Anglican. The writer, philosopher, preacher, and orator Ralph Waldo Emerson was born to a religious family in Boston just after the turn of the 19th century.

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