biography
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1802–80)
|
| biography:
| Transcendentalist, reformer, editor, and literary critic, born in Greenfield, Massachusetts, USA. Ordained a Unitarian minister (1826) after studies at Harvard College and Cambridge Theological Seminary, he ministered to a Boston congregation while studying German idealism. In his Discourses on the Philosophy of Religion (1836), he espoused a transcendentalist philosophy stressing individual intuition and the presence of the divine in all. He and his wife, Sophia Dana Ripley, also hosted meetings of a Transcendentalist Club. His philosophical views, combined with a strong belief in social reform, led him to leave the church and, with his wife and others, to establish a community at Brook Farm (on the edge of Boston) (1841). Under his influence, Brook Farm developed into an agricultural commune modelled after the ideas of French Socialist Charles Fourier. In 1845 Ripley began editing the Harbinger, a journal that propagated Fourierism. After the collapse of Brook Farm (1847) he moved to New York, where he wrote for the New-York Tribune, soon becoming a prominent literary critic, and also helped found Harper's New Monthly Magazine (1850) and was editor (1858–63) of the New American Cyclopaedia. Ripley prospered as a major stockholder in the Tribune, and was president of the Tribune Association after the death of Horace Greeley (1872). |
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