The Ralph Waldo Emerson House

10/10/2026

Join us at the Emerson House on October 18th for our final special program of the season: The Emersons at Home

Join us at the Emerson House on October 18th for our final special program of the season. You may know Ralph Waldo Emerson as the venerable Sage of Concord, but he was also a husband, father, and friend. In this unique guided tour, we’ll share affectionate and personal stories from the Emerson hou...

10/05/2026

This afternoon, as part of the continuing Public Research Talk series, the Transcendentalism Initiative, hosted by the Center for World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, Scott Pratt will present "Choosing Good or Evil—Royce and Emerson on Knowing the Difference" This talk will consider whether Ralph Waldo Emerson's work offers ways to discern between evil and good through aesthetics.

You can attend this talk in-person or virtually on zoom.

Calendar News & Events News & Eventsexpand_more Calendar Upcoming Conferences Past Conferences News Past Events The CSWR sponsors a variety of formal and informal academic programs designed to engage scholars and students of religious studies in what is becoming an increasingly globalized field, inc...

10/03/2026

Emerson's Aunt Mary Moody Emerson had a tremendous influence on him. She encouraged young Waldo to enjoy nature and to keep a daily journal, as she did. Her nephew would borrow largely from her journals when writing his essays and lectures. Aunt Mary instructed him to, "do what you are afraid to do,"—a quotation that he is now well known for.

Mary Moody Emerson chose to remain single, preferring an independent spiritual and intellectual life. She was a strong minded and opinionated women. She was also eccentric. According to her nephew, she made her bed as a coffin and wore out many shrouds in preparation for her ever-anticipated death. He remarked, "And when at last her release arrived," on October 3, 1863, "the event of her death had really such a comic tinge in the eyes of every one who knew her, that her friends feared they might, at her funeral, not dare to look at each other, lest they should forget the serious proprieties of the hour."

Despite his levity, Emerson greatly admired his aunt and he called her "my heroine." The epitaph on her headstone is his tribute to her: "She gave high counsels. It was the privilege of certain boys to have this immeasurably high standard indicated to their childhood; a blessing which nothing else in education could supply."

To her disappointment, Mary Moody Emerson lived to be 89 years old, her life spanning the American Revolution to the American Civil War. Rest in peace, Aunt Mary!

📷: Kristi Martin

10/01/2026

Our heartfelt gratitude to Michael Jonik, and all who were in attendance at last evening’s program, “Timeless Emerson.”

Jonik, Professor of American Literature and Philosophy at the University of Sussex, presented an overview of “The New Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson” (Cambridge University Press, 2026), which he edited. His talk highlighted new collective scholarship speaking to Emerson’s relevance to our times. Covering the full scope of Emerson’s career as a lecturer, an essayist, philosopher, and a poet, Jonik argued that Emerson’s work is always timely and fresh in his ever-progressing resistance to social conventions, and his ever-present challenge to us in asking, ‘how shall I live?’ The talk was followed by a thought-provoking conversation by the group, which included Emerson family descendants.

As we sat in a circle around Emerson’s writing table, the study was enlivened in the spirit of Emerson and the thinkers who gathered here with him to exchange ideas and discuss the great questions of their life and times. It was truly a special evening.

Image: Michael Jonik speaking in Ralph Waldo Emerson's Study at the Emerson House on September 30, 2026.

09/30/2026

197 years ago today, Ralph Waldo Emerson married his first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker, on September 30, 1829.

Five days before the wedding, seventeen-year-old Ellen wrote the last letter she would compose to Waldo before their marriage, "I tell you Waldo Emerson you must not leave off writing me when we live together - I love such long lived lines of affection ... but all I love dearly will be with me ... I love you Waldo most dearly..."

Ellen suffered from tuberculosis and died in February 1831. She never lived in the Emerson House in Concord.

Emerson remarried in September 1835. His second wife (Lydia) Lidian, who survived him, was the mother of his four children. She named their eldest daughter in tribute to her husband's first wife, Ellen Tucker Emerson.

Quotation from: One First Love: Letters of Ellen Louisa Tucker to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ed. Gregg, (Harvard University Press, 1962), 105-106.
Linked Image: Portrait of Ellen Louisa Tucker Emerson by Sarah Goodridge (c. 1830) in the collections of our neighbors at the Concord Museum (Object PI806).

09/29/2026

Dear Friends and Followers: Please DO NOT purchase tickets to our event tomorrow night from anyone online claiming to have extra tickets. These are not legitimate offers. Admission to this event is FREE, with registration made exclusively through us and the reservations are full. No one has tickets.

We'll try to keep on top of removing the SPAM comments attempting to take advantage of our visitors, but they have been numerous so far this morning. Thank you for your understanding.

09/29/2026

On September 29, 1855, Concord's Sleepy Hollow Cemetery was consecrated with a dedication ceremony. Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered an "ADDRESS TO THE INHABITANTS OF CONCORD ..." on the occasion. As he noted, the land had been locally called "Sleepy Hollow" for decades, and was a favorite walking place for the community, including Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Sleepy Hollow was designed as an ornamental 'garden cemetery' by prominent landscape architects H.W.S. Cleveland and Robert Morris to enhance the native environs, offer natural beauty as solace for the grieving, and provide an inspiring and soothing recreational retreat for the living. Henry David Thoreau surveyed the land and planned the man-made pond.
In his address, Emerson said, "In this quiet valley, as in the palm of Nature’s hand, we shall sleep well when we have finished our day."

He and many members of his immediate and extended family are buried in Sleepy Hollow, along with his friends and literary colleagues.

Image: Ralph Waldo Emerson's grave in the Emerson family plot, in the early 20th century, as it appeared prior to his eldest daughter Ellen's death in 1909. (Detroit Publishing Company, public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division).

09/26/2026

It is a wet and windy day here in New England as a Nor'easter arrives up the coast. Like Emerson, will you be spending the day with your books?

"The rain has spoiled the farmer's day;
Shall sorrow put my books away?
Thereby are two days lost:
Nature shall mind her own affairs,
I will attend my proper cares,
In rain, or sun, or frost."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Suum Cuique" (Poems, 1847)

The Latin title of this poem translates to "To Each His Own." Emerson scholar Albert J. Von Frank traces this poem to a rain day in Late April 1834 when Emerson was living in Newton, Massachusetts (Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Poetry, Harvard University Press, 2015, 74).

Image: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Allen & Rowell Studio, c 1875, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

09/25/2026

Recently a visitor asked a question that left us curious.

‘Did Ralph Waldo Emerson invent creative writing?’

Our first response was to consider that storytelling is an ancient art form and that what we call “creative writing” certainly predated Emerson, in which case, no, he didn’t invent it. But we were surprised by what we learned when we put a little spin on the question and looked into what might have prompted the inquiry connecting Emerson to creative writing's origins.

In his 1838 address “The American Scholar,” Emerson said, “there is creative reading as well as creative writing.” Emerson was advocating for creative, active, and independent thinking rather than the passive absorption and perpetuation of ideas. Olive Wendell Holmes Sr. later called Emerson’s essay, America’s “intellectual declaration of independence.”

It turns out that while Emerson did not invent creative writing, he is credited with the first documented use of the phrase “creative writing!”

(This usage by Emerson is further distinct from "Creative Writing" as an academic discipline, which developed in the 1880s).

Sometimes we learn something from our visitors too. Please keep your questions coming!

Image: Ralph Waldo Emerson's study at the Emerson House, photographed in 1888, Library of Congress, Wikipedia Commons.