Ralph Waldo Emerson House

From this house, Emerson wrote his well known essays, such as Self-Reliance and The American Scholar; cultivated friendships with Bronson Alcott, Henry Thoreau, Margaret Fuller and others; and traveled throughout the United States and Europe to give lectures on moral character, spiritual insight, education, political power and reform, the arts and sciences, and the social order. In his later years, he advocated passionately for the abolition of slavery.