McRay Magleby (b.1941),
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1986, lithograph, 27 1/4 x 20 1/4 inches. Brigham Young University Museum of Art, 2016.
American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on this day in 1803. Emerson is considered the father of the transcendentalist movement—a movement which believed in the inherent goodness and inner spirituality of humankind as well as a need for self reliance, drawing on English and German Romanticism, the philosophies of Immanuel Kant and Emanuel Swedenborg, and Hindu texts. He published many essays, speeches, and poems throughout his life, with one of the most well-known being
Self-Reliance.