William Emerson, best known as the father of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was a prominent minister, philanthropist, and man of letters in the burgeoning Boston culture of the young republic.

Born in Concord, Massachusetts, son of the Reverend William Emerson, a Revolutionary chaplain who died of fever returning from Ticonderoga, Emerson was raised by his stepfather, the Reverend Ezra Ripley, whom his mother, Phebe Bliss Emerson, married in 1780. Upon graduating from Harvard College in 1789, he taught grammar school for two years in Roxbury, Massachusetts, before returning briefly to Harvard to study divinity. In 1792 he was ordained minister of the town of Harvard, Massachusetts, where, besides supplementing his pastoral salary by teaching and farming, he delivered a popular July Fourth oration A Discourse, Delivered in Harvard (1794; frequently titled "On the American Independence, and the Means of Preserving It") and established the town's first social library, a book club whose 100-odd...