The American Renaissance, and thus the American character, was shaped in great part by the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, which was expressed in his essay, "Self-Reliance". His essay begins with the recognition of the inherent individuality in man; "There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till" (Emerson, n pag). It is, of course, non-conformity which is the result of this realization. The issue of conformity is an ironic one within the American culture - but the spirit of what Emerson wrote indeed is the embodiment of what is quintessentially American. The concept of self-determination and of total self-reliance is what filled the Pioneers in their Westward movement, it is what drove the creation of free capitalism, and is what has allowed our democracy to remain intact for more than two centuries. While Emerson did not create the non-conformity of the American spirit, he did capture it and glorify it.
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