Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson was a key literary figure in the development of transcendentalism and in the American Romanticism Movement. According to literary folklore, Ralph Waldo Emerson began the American Romanticism movement. ... Encouraging the writers of America to establish their literary independence from Europe, Emerson addressed the society in his speech called, “The American Scholar. ... Such works include, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories (Hurley 13, 15).