# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/ralph-waldo-emerson
# Generated: 2026-08-31T13:58:20.804Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/ralph-waldo-emerson"
name: "Ralph Waldo Emerson"
slug: "ralph-waldo-emerson"
description: "The essayist who told Americans to trust themselves and ignore the crowd—and made it stick. Emerson's lectures in the 1830s and '40s gave the country a philosophical backbone it hadn't built on its own, arguing that individual conscience mattered more than inherited doctrine."
tagline: "American philosopher (1803–1882)"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Ralph_Waldo_Emerson_ca1857_retouched.jpg?width=1200"
gender: "male"
country:
  name: "United States"
  isoCode: "US"
category:
  name: "Academics"
  slug: "academics"
profileType:
  name: "Academic"
  slug: "academic"
  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1803-05-25"
deathDate: "1882-04-27"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
scores:
  popularity:           81.06
  momentum:             13.17752945960303
  historical:           26.047968
  currentAttention:     41.27723560456408
  sourceConfidence:     60
  profileCompleteness:  70
  trendDirection:       "RISING"
ranks:
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  country:  211
  category: 40
tags:
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Born in 1803, Emerson started as a minister but drifted from the church and its orthodoxies, publishing "Nature" in 1836 to sketch out Transcendentalism: a vision where soul and universe were threads of the same fabric, no God standing apart. A year later his speech "The American Scholar" earned the label "intellectual Declaration of Independence" from Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Through the 1840s he wrote essays—"Self-Reliance", "The Over-Soul", "Experience"—first as lectures, then refined for print, all circling the same pole: the infinitude of the private man, the idea that freedom and selfhood were available to anyone willing to think past the consensus. Nietzsche called him the most gifted American; Whitman called him master. He died in 1882, having mentored Thoreau and left a mark on every writer who came after him convinced that one clear voice could matter more than the choir.