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**George Ripley**
__Unitarian Minister and Transcendental Journalist__
 * October 3rd, 1802** (Greenfield, MA) - **July 4, 1880** (New York, New York)

**Early Life and Education**
Ripley's early life was largely influenced by women. He was raised primarily by his conservative mother and sisters. He was sent to a private, college preparatory academy in Hadley, MA. Ripley's ideal educational setting was under the conservative wings of Yale University, but his father pushed him to attend Harvard, then known as a hotbed of liberal Unitarianism. Ripley was a studious lad, and not exactly the social type. He was rejected by his peers because of his known tendency to side with authority. He left Greenfield to continue further schooling after his graduation from Yale in 1823. He attended Harvard Divinity School, where he became interested in more "liberal" views of religious ideals. Ripley noted liberal religion as "simple, scriptural, reasonable."

**Career**
George Ripley officially became a minister at Boston's Purchase Street Church on November 8, 1826, and became influential in the developing of the Unitarian religion. In 1836, Rev. Ripley's career finally became eventful after the first ten quiet years of his tenure. He published two articles that year which charged leaders of the Unitarian church with religious intolerance because of their forced acceptance of miracles as a requirement for church membership. The Unitarian community responded harshly, claiming that disbelief in miracles denied the truth of Christianity. This dispute laid the groundwork for the separation of a more extreme Transcendentalism from its liberal Unitarian roots.

**Movement**
Along with Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman, George Ripley is considered one of the founders of the early Transcendentalist movement. He contributed largely to this abstract school of thought, berthed in the 1830s. Originally known as the Transcendental Club, this early organization for deep thinkers was a meeting-place and an organizing ground for their idealist frustration with the general state of American culture and society at the time, and in particular, the state of intellectualism at Harvard University and in the Unitarian church. George Ripley did not leave the ministry, however, until 1840, when he read a 7,300 word resignation letter to the Purchase Street Church, lecturing about his dissatisfaction with Unitarianism. In the late 1830s Ripley became increasingly engaged in "Associationism", an early Fourierist socialist movement. In October 1840 he announced to the Transcendental Club his plan to form an Associationist community based on Fourier's Utopian plans. This ambition led to the creation of Brook Farm. Brook Farm was initially based mostly on the ideals of Transcendentalism; its founders believed that by pooling labor they could sustain the community and still have time for literary and scientific pursuits. The experiment meant to serve as an example for the rest of the world, established on the principles of "industry without drudgery, and true equality without its vulgarity." The community was short-lived; its ambitious motives and rebellious nature lasting a whopping total of five years.

**Writing**
George Ripley began work as a freelance journalist following the economic collapse of Brook Farm. By 1849, Ripley was employed by the New York Tribune as a literary critic. Under this position, he believed in high moral standards for literature but offered good-natured praise in the majority of his reviews. He stayed away from philosophy of theology, despite some efforts to persuade him to write on the subject. As he told a friend, he had "long since lost... immediate interest in that line of speculation."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Ripley_%28transcendentalist%29

"Transcendental Club - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." //Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia//. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 Oct. 2012. .