Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on May 25, 1803 in Boston, Massachusetts. He is widely regarded as one of America's most influential authors, philosophers and thinkers. At one time a Unitarian minister, Emerson left his pastorate because of doctrinal disputes with his superiors. Soon after, on a trip to Europe, he met a number of intellectuals, including Thomas Carlyle and William Wordsworth.

The ideas of these men, along with those of Plato and some of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Persian thinkers, strongly influenced his development of the philosophy of "Transcendentalism".

Emerson urged independent thinking and stressed that not all life's answers are found in books. In his "The American Scholar" address to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge in 1837 Emerson states that: "Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst." He believed that as a scholar and poet, one learns best by engaging life.