New England essayist, lecturer, and reluctant prophet who almost single-handedly invented what would come to be called American intellectual culture. Emerson was ordained a Unitarian minister in Boston in 1829, resigned his pulpit in 1832 over his inability to administer the Lord's Supper in good faith, traveled to Europe (meeting Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth), settled in Concord, Massachusetts, and reinvented himself as the itinerant lecturer whose addresses and essays would shape a generation.
His 1836 manifesto Nature announced the themes of what became Transcendentalism: the divinity immanent in the natural world; the priority of direct personal experience over inherited doctrine; the irrelevance of dead forms; the duty of self-reliance. The American Scholar address (1837) called for American intellectual independence from Europe. The Divinity School Address (1838) outraged Harvard by suggesting that Jesus was a great man rather than a divinely unique revelation — and that every genuine soul had access to the same divinity. Self-Reliance (1841), his most famous essay, is the founding document of a particular American sensibility: trust yourself, every heart vibrates to that iron string, the great soul has no history, do not imitate.
Emerson's gifts are uneven. His essays are aphoristic rather than systematic — Nietzsche loved him for precisely this, and called him one of the philosophers he most admired. His optimism is sometimes philosophically thin. But the Emersonian tone — individualist, spiritually hungry, anti-traditional, reliant on nature as teacher, suspicious of mediation — ran on through Henry David Thoreau (his neighbor and protégé), Walt Whitman (who wrote him a reverent letter on the publication of Leaves of Grass), William James's pragmatism, and much later American self-invention whether or not the source is still remembered.