The works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his young ward and friend, Henry David Thoreau, were prime movers of the American Transcendentalist Movement, which focused on the individual person's mind, heart and soul as the center of the universe and objective facts, merely secondary in importance The movement, Emerson in particular, stressed the utter need for self-reliance both as a philosophical and as an economic pursuit. This required freedom from outside and inside constraints from social institutions and norms and government interference. But what Emerson taught and idealized in his time, Thoreau realized in a concrete way by actually deserting society and living a hermit's life in Walden, thriving on nature and contemplating it as his life's purpose.
