Ralph Waldo Emerson's Life And Accomplishments

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Ralph Waldo Emerson “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once said. Ralph was born on May 25, 1803 in Boston, Massachusetts(poets.org). His father was a clergyman, which is a male religious leader, just like many other ancestors were (poets.org). When Ralph was about 8 years old, his father died from stomach cancer, after the birth of his eighth child (shmoop.com). When Ralph was young, he attended the Boston Latin School (poets.org). After graduating from Boston School, he began an undergraduate study in Harvard (shmoop.com). He worked part-time as a grammar teacher to earn money (shmoop.com). When Emerson graduated from Harvard, he began to teach …show more content…

Soon, he became the head pastor of the church (shmoop.com). He quit the ministry because it was harder than expected, and it left him with no more work to do (noteablebiographies.com). A little while after he quit his ministry job, Ellen, his wife, died of tuberculosis, and Ralph was devastated (poets.org). After he left his job in the ministry, he scraped up enough money to take a tour of Europe (noteablebiographies.com). He left for Europe in 1832 (biography.com). There, he joined a group called the Transcendentalists, who believe that people can move beyond the physical world and get deeper in their spirits (biography.com). He returned home in 1833. Then he began to make his philosophical questions about nature, to start off. He gave lectures, which turned into essays and books and he began to publish books in the early 1840’s (noteablebiographies.com). His very first public lecture was entitled “The Uses of Natural History.” “I believe the mind is the creator of the world, and is ever creating- that at least Matter is dead Mind; that mind makes the senses it sees with; that the genius of man is a continuation of the power that made him and that has not done making him.” He then made a book called Nature (1836), which explained his thinking about how the world is merely microcosm of nature (poets.org). The year after he published Nature, he gave a speech that encouraged authors to create