Born in Boston, Waldo was one of the eight children of William Emerson, the eminent minister of the First Church in Boston. Upon the death of his father when Waldo was eight, his mother fought against poverty by taking in borders.

After Waldo attended Harvard College and Harvard Divinity School, he became the minister of the Second Church in Boston (Unitarian). When he could not in good conscience conduct the Lord's Supper, he resigned in 1832 and moved to Concord to write.

In 1836, his first book, Nature, initiated a new movement, Transcendentalism, which fostered a new renaissance of American literature and life rooted in the affirmation: "The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God."

Emerson's 1837 Harvard Phi Beta Kappa address on "The American Scholar" Oliver Wendell Holmes proclaimed America's Declaration of Intellectual Independence. "We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe," Emerson said and predicted that America would become the pole star for a thousand years. "A nation of men will for the first time exist because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul."

At his "Divinity School Address" delivered in 1838, hearers were urged to acquaint themselves at first hand with deity. This radical Christian critic of "corpse cold Unitarianism" also declared that "Miracle is monster." Andrews Norton, Professor of Biblical Literature, branded Emerson's work "the latest form of infidelity." Ralph Waldo Emerson was not invited back to Harvard for thirty years.

The speaker was not exempt from tragedy. Loss of his first wife, aged nineteen, was followed by a son's death after Emerson remarried. Rheumatism and poor eyesight plagued him, but he persisted in delivering lectures near and far, and writing poems and essays, letters and his diary, all grandly celebrated in 2003, the bicentennial of his birth. The Sage of Concord has been recognized as the most important figure in America's cultural renaissance of the nineteenth century.