Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thoreau was close friends and a protégé of fellow transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson and it was on Emerson’s property where Thoreau lived and wrote Walden. A leader of the Transcendentalist movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson was anything but transcendent when he arrived at Concord. He was a young man who suffered from uncertainty, melancholy, and difficult circumstances. Ralph Waldo Emerson was no stranger to poverty, which has a way of tainting all of life's experiences. His mother began taking in boarders after his father passed away when he was a youngster, leaving a wife and three sons. She still struggled to make ends meet. A family acquaintance "discovered the family one day without any food, except the stories of heroic endurance that their aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, was regaling them with," according to one biographer. Emerson and his brother Edward had but one overcoat between them, and had to take turns going to school.”1 He was accepted at Harvard at an early age, and waited tables to defray tuition. But he was an unspectacular student. His brothers were more brilliant than he.
Emerson turned unsuccessfully to teaching, and subsequently head-mistressing, at a school in his mother's house due to what seemed to be a rising sense of failure. He finally made the decision to enter the ministry and succeeded in getting a good job. But his abilities were limited to the pulpit. He visits a Revolutionary War warrior on his deathbed, according to a well-known tale. When he was unable to find any consoling words, he moved the subject to glassmaking. "Young fellow, if you don't know your business, you had better go home," the elderly man roared from his bed.
