Sheer chance made Henry David Thoreau's entrance to writing easier, for he came under the benign influence of the essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had settled in Concord during Thoreau's sophomore year at Harvard. By the autumn of 1837, they were becoming friends. Emerson sensed in Thoreau a true disciple—that is, one with so much Emersonian self-reliance that he would still be his own man. Thoreau saw in Emerson a guide, a father, and a friend.
With his magnetism Emerson attracted others to Concord. Out of their heady speculations and affirmatives came New England Transcendentalism. In retrospect it was one of the most significant literary movements of 19th-century America, with at least two authors of world stature, Henry David Thoreau and Emerson, to its credit. Essentially it combined romanticism with reform. It celebrated the individual rather than the masses, emotion rather than reason, nature rather than man. It conceded that there were two ways of knowing, through the senses and through intuition, but asserted that intuition transcended tuition. Similarly, it conceded that matter and spirit both existed. It asserted, however, that the reality of spirit transcended the reality of matter. It strove for reform yet insisted that reform begin with the individual, not the group or organization. --Encyclopedia Britannica
