Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson was the American essayist, poet, and lecturer who gave the nineteenth century its intellectual spine and whose influence on American thought — on Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, William James, and beyond — has never fully dissipated. Born in Boston in 1803, he trained as a Unitarian minister, resigned his pulpit, and spent the rest of his career as a secular preacher of self-reliance, nonconformity, and the divinity of direct experience. His essays — Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, Fate, Experience — remain the founding documents of American Transcendentalism and the sharpest challenge to inherited authority ever written in the country. The only true gift is a portion of yourself: the sentence captures his whole philosophy, which is that authenticity is the only currency that holds its value.