Who is Ralph Waldo Emerson from How to Read and Why and what is their importance?

Ralph Waldo Emerson lived and wrote in the 1800s in Concord, Massachusetts, and his writings about self-reliance are echoed in much of Bloom's writing about the self and its responsibilities in terms of self knowledge. In "How to Read and Why", Bloom quotes Emerson's saying that one seeks in literature the sense that one nature wrote and the same nature reads, and this makes Emerson central to Bloom's idea that the reader finds him or herself in every literary work.