Portal:Literature/Biography archive/2007, Week 21

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, poet, and leader of the Transcendentalist movement in the early nineteenth century.

In September 1835, Emerson and other like-minded intellectuals founded the Transcendental Club, which served as a center for the movement, but did not publish its journal The Dial, until July 1840. Emerson anonymously published his first essay, Nature, in September 1836.