emerson
In 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that "society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members." The conspiracy he described was social: the pressure of neighbors, congregations, parties, and institutions, all of which survived by making themselves necessary and making
emerson
In the middle of "Self-Reliance," Emerson drops a line that should stop every restless reader cold: "Travelling is a fool's paradise." The sentence is easy to misread as the grumbling of a homebody, a man too comfortable in Concord to appreciate the wider world. But Emerson is not arguing against tr
emerson
On August 31, 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson stood before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard and delivered an address that Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. would later call "our intellectual Declaration of Independence" [VERIFY exact Holmes quote and source]. Emerson was thirty-four years old, a former minis
emerson
In 1841, the same year he published "Self-Reliance," Emerson published a companion essay called "Circles" that most readers have never encountered. Where "Self-Reliance" establishes the center — trust yourself, act from your own judgment, refuse to conform for the sake of conformity — "Circles" desc
emerson
On July 15, 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson stood before the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School and delivered an address that would get him effectively banned from the university for nearly three decades [VERIFY exact duration — commonly cited as approximately 29 years, with Emerson not invited b
emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson published "Self-Reliance" in 1841, and the essay has been generating arguments ever since — most of them about whether its vision of individual sovereignty is genuinely universal or secretly provincial. The question is fair. Emerson was a white, Harvard-educated man living in Con
emerson
In the winter of 1845, Ralph Waldo Emerson boarded a train to deliver a lecture in a town he had never visited, to an audience that had never heard him speak, on a topic he had chosen himself. No university had assigned the subject. No publisher had commissioned the talk. No church had approved the
emerson
Emerson's most frequently misunderstood argument is his case against conformity. "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist," he wrote in "Self-Reliance," and the sentence has been adopted by every variety of rebel, contrarian, and dropout since 1841. But Emerson was not celebrating rebellion for
emerson
Emerson was not poor, and he did not pretend to be. When he resigned from Boston's Second Church in 1832, he walked away from a steady salary — but not into destitution. His first wife, Ellen Tucker, had died in 1831, and her estate eventually provided Emerson with an inheritance that, combined with
emerson
In 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson published an essay that would become the founding text of a tradition. "Self-Reliance" appeared in his first collection, *Essays: First Series*, and it made an argument so direct that American intellectual life has been responding to it ever since. "Trust thyself: every
emerson
In the spring of 1837, a twenty-year-old Harvard senior named Henry David Thoreau read an essay that rearranged his sense of what was possible. The essay was "Nature," published the year before by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and its argument — that an American thinker could derive original insight from dir
emerson
There is a sentence in Emerson's "Self-Reliance" that has been quoted so often it has become wallpaper: "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string." You see it on coffee mugs and motivational posters, stripped of its context, offered as a vague encouragement to feel good about your cho