Ralph Waldo Emerson 
Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson 

In 1834, Ralph Waldo Emerson, formerly a Unitarian minister, began a new career as a public lecturer. Many of those lectures formed the source material for his essays. Nature (1836), his first published work, contained the essence of his transcendental philosophy, which involved viewing the world of natural phenomena as a symbol of the inner life and emphasizing individual freedom and self-reliance. This collection contains eleven of his most celebrated and memorable essays from this period: “Self-Reliance, ” “Nature, ” “Circles, ” “Friendship, ” “Heroism, ” “Prudence, ” “Compensation, ” “Gifts, ” “Manners, ” “Shakespeare; Or, the Poet, ” and “The American Scholar.”

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Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-nineteenth century. Although he began his career as a Unitarian minister, he gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of transcendentalism instead. Seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, he disseminated his thoughts through published essays and public lectures across the United States.