Ralph Waldo Emerson biography :

American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on 25 May 1803 in Boston, Massachusetts. At the tender age of eight, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s father, Reverend William Emerson, died. He and his three surviving brothers (his parents had seven children) were then raised by their mother, Ruth Haskins.

Emerson studied at Harvard College at 14 and proceeded to attend the Harvard Divinity School. He was ordained a minister of the Second Church in Boston in 1829, just before he married his first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker in 30 September of the same year. He resigned from this position in 1832 shortly after his wife passed away from tuberculosis on 08 February 1831.

Distraught over the death of his wife, Emerson sold his properties and went to Europe. He spent most of his time in Italy and had occasional trips to Switzerland and Paris. It was during his stay in Paris, at the Jardin Des Plantes, that he became interested in science and became a naturalist.

On October 1833, Emerson returned to the United States and became a public lecturer. In 1835, Emerson moved to Concorde, Massachusetts, where he met and married Lydia Jackson on 14 September 1835. This union produced four children: Waldo, Ellen Edith and Edward. His eldest son, Waldo, died of Scarlatina in 1842.
Emerson wrote several literary works, among these is his first book entitled Nature (1836) and his greatest essay, “The Poet” which was penned in 1844. Ralph Waldo Emerson succumbed to pneumonia in 27 April 1882 in Concord, Massachusetts.