Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts on May 25, 1803. His father, Reverend William Emerson, was a Unitarian minister at the famous First Church in Boston. His mother, Ruth Haskins Emerson was the daughter of a cooper and distiller. He was the fourth of six children in his family. Three of his brothers were very intelligent. Of the other two, one was mentally retarded and lived most of his life in institutions. The other was insane for a time.

Emerson was a serious young boy who was liked by elders more than those of his own age. He never went out to play with the boys because he liked doing things that had to do with literature which was

Emerson was not a good pastor and was dedicated into carry out his duties well. Many of his sermons were repeated over and over again. His wife died of tuberculosis after a short but happy marriage on February 8, 1831. He resigned his position as a pastor on October 28, 1832 after he told his parishioners about his unwillingness and dissatisfaction with the profession.

He had not written or thought of anything new after he turned sixty. Emerson's mental capabilities were gradually failing. Soon he forgot what he had written in his work and he could not remember the names of his old friends. Emerson died of pneumonia in Concord on April 27, 1882. He was seventy- eight years old. Emerson is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery next to Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne, two writers who he had influenced. (Gay 254) After his death, his Edward Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes edited and published his journals in ten volumes in 1909. (Richardson)

Afterwards, he taught in his older brother's private school for three years so that he could help his family to pay their debts off. He did not like it and was not satisfied. When he turned twenty-one, he decided to join the ministry. Emerson enrolled in the Harvard Divinity School in 1825 to study theology. He then married Ellen Louisa Tucker of Concord, New Hampshire on September 10, 1829. Emerson was licensed to preach on October 1826. He became a Unitarian pastor at the Old Second Church of Boston. (Hale 308)

Emerson began a career as a writer and lecturer. He had a lecture tour annually and each year he would go further west. These lectures came from a journal he had kept since 1820 and were the source of most of his essays. He gave his first lecture, "The Uses of Natural History," on November 5, 1833 at the Masonic Temple is Boston. One of his well-known lectures

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