Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in 1803, one of 5 children. His father, a minister, died in 1811, when he was 8, and his mother raised the children alone. They were poor, so Emerson went to Harvard on a scholarship. After he graduated, he taught at a women's school for a time, and then entered Harvard Divinity School. He became the minister of the Second Unitarian Church in Boston, and was successful and popular. But as his ideas developed, he became more uncomfortable with the idea of organized religion, and eventually resigned his position.

He travelled in Europe, and when he returned, he published Nature, in which he argued that God made Nature as a reflection of the spiritual world. Nature was a scripture, he said, immediate and accessible to the individual mind and soul. He rejected old ideas, especially European ones: "We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe...There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own work and laws and worship." In "Self-Reliance," he went on to express the idea that divinity exists in each individual self. He ethically opposed selfishness and materialism: one's most important quest is to merge with the "Oversoul," i.e., God. One's identity rests on unity with nature, and on being true to oneself, rather than to the institutions of society. He saw science and God not as separate and competing forces; rather, science illuminated the mysteries of God.

As for literarure, he rejected the didactic and allegorical, and saw the poet as the interpreter, one whose role is to provide a platform from which to gain a greater view of the world's possibilities. The world is full of symbols, but those symbols, rather than representing any one fixed idea, suggest a range of possibilites. He knew that he, himself, was not the genius America needed to express its new "self," but he was sure that genius would come: "Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres."

In 1825, the year he entered divinity school, he married a woman he loved deeply, Ellen Tucker. She was already ill when they married, and she died less than two years later of tuberculosis. He remarried in 1835 and had four children; his oldest child, Waldo, died at age 6. Despite all of the upheavals and activity in his life, Emerson tried to live as quiet and contemplative a life as possible. His mental and physical health began to fail in 1872, and he died in 1882.

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817 and died in 1862, at age 44. His life was outwardly unremarkable and uneventful, and he was not economically successful by anyone's standards, nor did he aspire to be. Yet his work outshone that of Emerson, his mentor, and has had international influence.

Thoreau was born into a poor family. Nevertheless, unlike most other young men of his social class, he went to Harvard, where he supported himself by doing odd jobs and chores, and teaching in the vacations and summers. After his graduation he tried teaching. He and his brother John opened a private school in Concord, Massachusetts and it was a success for a time, but it was closed after John died of lockjaw in 1842. Thoreau also worked intermittently with his father in their pencil factory. He lived with Emerson for a while, and also with Emerson's brother, earning his keep by doing chores, caring for the house and tutoring the children. He contributed essays to The Dial and did lecture tours on occasion. In 1849, he published A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; it was not a commercial success. His masterpiece, Walden, was published in 1854. Thoreau contracted tuberculosis and died at age 44, in 1862.

The most famous period of Thoreau's life was the time when he lived at Walden Pond, just south of Concord Village, on land owned by Emerson. In March of 1845, Thoreau began building a house there and moved in on July 4. He lived there for 2 years and 2 months. In the journal he kept of this time, which was later edited and published as Walden, he describes his efforts, experiences, encounters with nature and other people, and shows how he put into practice his philosophy.

Thoreau believed in simplicity and argued against materialism. He believed in the divine unity of nature. He had little interest in travel; he felt that each place is a microcosm of the universe. He argued for change, not socially, but in the individual spirit and conscience. One cannot control what the rest of the world does, he says in "Civil Disobedience," but one can control oneself, and if everyone makes the right choices, the task of social reform will be accomplished.

Nevertheless, he was moved by various political events of his time. He opposed slavery and made abolitionist speeches on a number of occasions. He also opposed the Fugitive Slave Act and spoke out against it. And he refused to pay his taxes in support of the Mexican War, and was jailed for a night, an experience which inspired his most famous essay, "Civil Disobedience" (also sometimes called "Resistance to Civil Government"). This essay directly influenced the ideas and methods of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.