Ralph Waldo Emerson

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 selfho…