Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet and led the Transcendentalist movement during the mid-19th century. A critic of the pressures of society on individual freedoms and a champion of individualism. Fighting for changes through his many publications moving slowly away from the religious and social beliefs of others at his time. Emerson was a tremendously influential developing many ideas such as individualism, freedom and the ability for human kind to learn almost anything. He influenced many writers such as Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and his friend Henry David Thoreau.