Ralph Waldo Emerson
In his later life, Emerson was a close friend of many other important authors and thinkers, including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Carlyle. He traveled the world, including France, England, Italy and the Middle East. Emerson was active in writing and speaking into the 1870s. However, he started to forget things. He would only read from detailed notes or scripts. By 1879, his memory was so bad that he stopped making public appearances and speeches. He still socialized at private events, but never with the amount of talking that he once did. Walt Whitman described him at a party in 1881 to be a careful listener but he didn’t join in any conversations. Within six months, in early 1882, Emerson died of pneumonia in Concord, Massachusetts.