Background+Info-sebastians1

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on May 3, 1803, in Boston. He received a classical education at Boston Latin Schol and Havard College. "Following in his father's footsteps, Emerson was ordained a Unitarian minister in 1829, but he experienced a religious crisis after the death from tuberculosis of his first wife, the beautiful and romantic Ellen Tucker, to whom he had been married only eighteen months. Resigning from the Second Church and journeying to England in 1832" (PBS: I Hear America Singing). He helped define the natural identity of art, and he expounded his views on mystical harmonies of man and nature, the essential perfectibility of human spirit, the unity of man and the divine Over-Soul, and the values of non-conformity, intellectual and spiritual independence, self-reliance, and utopian friendship. As he grew older, he struggled with his memory and he had his daughters helo him edit his papers and publish his last two volumes, he died when he was seventy-nine on April 27, 1882 of pneumonia.