Synesthesia was not widely documented or understood until the early twentieth century. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s eldest daughter, Ellen Tucker Emerson, is perhaps the first American child known to have experienced synesthesia. While caring for the Emerson children in their father’s absence, Henry David Thoreau wrote in a letter to Emerson, “I was struck by Ellen’s asking me, yesterday … if I did not use ‘colored’ words. She said that she could tell the color of a great many words, and amused the children at school by doing so” (F. B. Sanborn, “The Emerson-Thoreau Correspondence,” The Atlantic,
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