Emerson, Ralph Waldo

1803 – He was born on the 25th of May this year in Boston, Massachusetts. As a child, he experienced illness, poverty, and the death of a parent.

1812 – He was subsequently sent to the Boston Latin School in 1812 at the age of nine.

1817 - At fourteen Emerson went to Harvard College and was appointed Freshman's President, a position which gave him a room free of charge.

1829 – He became Unitarian Minister.

1831 – His brief career as a minister was marred by religious doubt and by his wife's death this year.

1832 – He toured Europe in Dreni.

1835 – He remarried and settled in Concord. A year later he celebrated the birth of his first child as well as publication of his first book, Nature.

1836 - He gradually drifted from the doctrines of his peers, then formulated and first expressed the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his essay, Nature.

1842 – He lost his first son, Waldo, to scarlet fever. Emerson wrote about his grief in two major works: the poem "Threnody", and the essay "Experience."

1845 – On his journal records, he was reading the Bhagavad Gita and Henry Thomas Colebrooke's Essays on the Vedas.

1882 – He died on the 27th day of April this year in Concord, Massachusetts. He was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts.