Cdv with photographer's identification on both recto and verso of Warren, Boston. Born in Boston, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) spent most of his life in and around Concord and Boston, with a brief foray to Florida for health reasons. The son of a Unitarian minister, his brother, William, became a minister, and later, Waldo attended Harvard Divinity School, having graduated from Harvard College in 1821. After being ordained in 1829, he began to doubt his beliefs. He resigned in 1832, and began a career of lecturing. Most of his writings began as lectures, and were then modified for print. As his views of Transcendentalism developed, his writings reflected what Oliver Wendell Holmes called America's "Intellectual Declaration of Independence," with its focus on the individual rather than the pressures of society. Emerson began traveling widely giving lectures, ranging as far as Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota and California. He also toured Europe several times, including just after the February Revolution in Paris and the other European revolutions of the late 1840s. These influenced his view of the American Civil War, even though he had long been an abolitionist. During the war he gave a lecture series in Washington, and met with Salmon P. Chase, Edwin Stanton, Gideon Welles, William Seward, and, eventually, Lincoln himself. He gave a memorial address in Concord after Lincoln's assassination. By early in the 1870s, Emerson began to lose his health and memory. He quit lecturing on a regular basis, and when he did, he stuck with a familiar audience. He died in 1882, just short of his 79th birthday.
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