Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson resigned his Boston pulpit in 1832, unable to administer communion in good faith, and made a new career on the lecture platform, speaking across America for forty years. Nature, the Harvard addresses and the Essays of 1841 and 1844, with Self-Reliance and The Over-Soul, gave Transcendentalism its texts: trust yourself, and the divine is in each of us. Thoreau lived in his house; Whitman sent him Leaves of Grass. The Journal he kept for fifty years is the workshop, and Representative Men and English Traits the lectures of his maturity.