ABSTRACT
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was born on March 8, 1841 in Boston, and he was born to a family of unusual prestige. Holmes could count among his ancestors Anne Bradstreet, the first notable poet in seventeenth-century New England; there was also Dorothy Quincy, wife of Founding Father John Hancock. Thirty-eight years older than Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson was an acclaimed philosopher and a popular speaker by the time Holmes entered Harvard as a freshman in 1857. Over the years, it was not Dr. Holmes, for all his achievements, but Emerson, who would rival the Justice Holmes as a seminal cultural's figure in American history. Society's hostility to such independence of mind was a threat that had obsessed Emerson. The independent thinker, Emerson warned, was likely to incense his audience. For Emerson, the answer was straightforward: "whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist." With this, Emerson insisted that as a man you had to be a nonconformist.
