RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882:

	Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-82, one of America's most influential
	authors and thinkers; b. Boston. A Unitarian minister, he left his
	only pastorate, Boston's Old North Church (1829-32), because of
	doctrinal disputes. On a trip to Europe Emerson met Thomas CARLYLE,
	S.T. COLERIDGE, and WORDSWORTH, whose ideas, along with those of
	Plato, the Neoplatonists, Asian mystics, and SWEDENBORG, strongly
	influenced his philosophy. Returning home (1835), he settled in
	Concord, Mass., which he, Margaret FULLER, THOREAU, and others made
	a center of TRANSCENDENTALISM. He stated the movement's main
	principles in Nature (1836), stressing the mystical unity of nature.
	A noted lecturer, Emerson called for American intellectual
	independence from Europe in his Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard
	("The American Scholar," 1837 [.txt-only version]). In an address at
	the Harvard divinity school (1838), he asserted that redemption
	could be found only in one's own soul and intuition. Emerson
	developed transcendentalist themes in his famous Journal (kept since
	his student days at Harvard), in the magazine The Dial, and in his
	series of Essays (1841, 1844). Among the best known of his essays
	are "The Over-Soul," "Compensation," and "Self-Reliance." He is also
	noted for his poems, e.g., "Threnody," "Brahma," and "The Problem."
	His later works include Representative Men (1850), English Traits
	(1856), and The Conduct of Life (1870).