Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and philosopher who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-nineteenth century. A Unitarian minister who left the church, he developed a philosophy centred on the divinity of the individual, the primacy of intuition over tradition, and the spiritual significance of the natural world. His essays — particularly "Self-Reliance," "The Over-Soul," and "Nature" — shaped the American intellectual character more profoundly than any other writer. He was also the mentor who first recognised the genius of Thoreau and Whitman.
