Ripley, George (1802-1880)

US transcendentalist, reformer, editor, and literary critic. 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. His philosophical views, combined with a strong belief in social reform, led him to leave the church and to establish a community at Brook Farm (on the edge of Boston) in 1841.

Brook Farm developed into an agricultural commune modelled after the ideas of French socialist Charles Fourier. In 1845 he began editing the Harbinger, a journal that propagated Fourierism. After the collapse of Brook Farm in 1847 he moved to New York, where he wrote for the New York Tribune, soon becoming a prominent literary critic; he also helped found Harper's New Monthly Magazine in 1850 and was editor of the New American Cyclopaedia. 1858-63. He was a major stockholder in the Tribune and was president of the Tribune Association after the death of Horace Greeley in 1872.

He was born in Greenfield, Massachusetts. Ordained a Unitarian minister in 1826 after studies at Harvard College and Cambridge Theological Seminary, he ministered to a Boston congregation while studying German idealism.