Happy Birthday, Ralph Waldo Emerson

May 25, 1803, Boston, MA | Died April 27, 1882, Concord, MA

Today, the Best American Essays newsletter celebrates essayist, philosopher, and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson on the 222nd anniversary of his birth.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1846, Eastman Johnson.

“You should start [writing] with no skeleton or plan. The natural one will grow as you work. Knock away all scaffolding. Neither have exordium or peroration. What is it you are writing for anyway? Because you have something new to say?”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1857, Josiah Johnson Hawes.

“The best way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent.”

“Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language, not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book that is written in that tongue,” from “Nature,” a book-length essay published in 1836.

First published essay:

• “Nature,” James Munroe and Company, 1836.

Select nonfiction bibliography:

• Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Journals 1820-1842, edited by Lawrence Rosenwald, Library of America, 2010.

• Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Journals 1841-1877, edited by Lawrence Rosenwald, Library of America, 2010.

• Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays & Lectures, edited by Joel Porte, Library of America, 1983.

See also:

Visit the Ralph Waldo Emerson collection of papers at the New York Public Library.

Visit the Ralph Waldo Emerson Papers, 1835-1871, Concord Free Library

Visit the Emerson Society, home of the Emerson Society Papers and more.

Watch A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Robert D. Richardson Annual Forum, featuring James Marcus, Concord Museum, 2024.

Watch Unlocking the Secrets of Emerson, an interview by Christine Lambie with Barbara Solowey, School of Philosophy and Economic Science, 2023

Watch Emerson and the Examined Life, a bicentennial celebration of Emerson, with poet Robert Pinsky and Emerson scholars Richard Geldard and David M. Robinson, 2014.

Read Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Marcus (Princeton University Press, 2024).

Read First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process, Robert D. Richardson (University of Iowa Press, 2015).

Read Emerson: The Mind on Fire, Robert D. Richardson (University of California Press, 1996).

Read Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Lawrence Buell (Pearson, 1992).

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