Henry David Thoreau was a famous American transcendentalist who looked to the environment for inspiration. Thoreau built a cabin at Walden Pond and lived there alone for a little over two years before publishing his book, Walden, which was about his time living in seclusion and his different feelings about society. He wanted to live a simple life and believed that government should not exist because it forced people to conform. Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned"? Get the original essay The year Thoreau spent at Harvard, he wore a green coat instead of the black coat that was required, proving that he would not allow anyone to control him. He also wrote Civil Obedience, a personal account of the time he spent in prison for refusing to pay taxes that helped support the Mexican-American War. He encouraged everyone to ask questions if they had any doubts. Before his death in 1962, Thoreau continued to defend his beliefs by helping slaves escape to Canada in order to gain freedom. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Father of Transcendentalism", was the leader of the Transcendentalist movement in the mid-19th century. He was a thinker ahead of his time, against slavery, and he emphasized autonomy, optimism, self-improvement, self-confidence and freedom. Emerson helped with this through The Dial, a major magazine on transcendental beliefs. He became first a teacher and then a minister who rejected Calvinism, the theological system of John Calvin and his followers marked by a strong emphasis on the sovereignty of God, the depravity of humanity, and the doctrine of predestination . It absorbed the Christian religion of Unitarianism: the belief that there is one God and not the Trinity (Mother, Father and Holy Spirit). A major turning point in his life was the death of his wife, which caused him to question his faith and leave the pulpit. He continued to believe in the divine and even commonly referred to it in his writings. Emerson believed that humans were born with a divine way of thinking and that the human mind was the most important force in the universe. In 1833, Emerson introduced the idea of ​​the oversoul, a universal spirit to which all beings return after death, or in other words, every being is part of the spirit of God. Emerson's work influenced many other famous transcendentalist thinkers, such as Thoreau, Alcott, and Fuller. Margaret Fuller was a social reformer, leader of the women's movement, and transcendentalist in the 1840s. She edited The Dial, a popular transcendentalist magazine, for two years until Emerson took over. He appealed to those who sought “perfect freedom” and “progress in philosophy and theology.” Fuller published Women in the Nineteenth Century, proclaiming that a new era was changing the relationships between men and women. His philosophy was based on the principle that everyone could develop a life-giving relationship with God. In 1948, she finally became literary critic for the New York Tribune and traveled to Italy to report on the revolution. Margaret Fuller's story inspires me so much because people believed that she couldn't succeed because she was a woman, but she definitely proved them wrong by becoming the first woman to display her transcendental beliefs. Walt Whitman was the editor of the Brooklyn. Daily Eagle, although it did not adapt well due to its disagreement with the Democratic Party and its overly radical editorials. Qualities of Whitman's style included poetry in verse,.