She participated in the lively discussions held at Emerson’s home, and he called her “an extraordinary person for.
The “more man has learned of his nature,” she observed, “the more he has felt there is no solitary enjoyment.” Fuller, a prominent journalist and book reviewer, edited The Dial, a seminal newsletter of transcendentalist thought. Peabody, Gross notes, was a transcendentalist long before Emerson, and she was keen to temper its principles with a social conscience. Women also figure into “The Transcendentalists,” which discusses the contributions of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Margaret Fuller, and others to the movement. By the time Thoreau came along, few “traces of their presence remained on the landscape, except for the cellar holes Thoreau investigated with so much curiosity during his sojourn at Walden.” Paraphrasing an iconic line from “Walden,” for example, Gross mentions that before Thoreau memorialized that now-famous stretch of trees, “no one went to the woods in order to live deliberately.” Instead, the area where Thoreau would build his cabin was once a neighborhood for social outcasts, including marginalized African Americans. As in “The Minutemen,” he expands his story to include a wide cast of supporting characters who have typically been overlooked. Gross’ book positions Emerson and Thoreau as a part of, not apart from, this messy transition. It was a community in ferment, whose small, ordered society, founded by Puritans and defended by Minutemen, was dramatically unsettled by the expansive forces of capitalism and democracy.” “Although its population numbered little more than two thousand souls,” Gross tells readers, “the town was as profoundly affected by the upheavals of the age as any booming metropolis. Both Concord sages had a weakness for sounding above it all.Įven so, the abiding contribution of “The Transcendentalists” is its reminder that Concord, for all its reputation nearly two centuries ago as an idyll of reflection, was far from immune from the hurly-burly of a rapidly growing country. In their writings and lectures, both men tended not so much to argue their positions as to proclaim them, embracing a certitude that sometimes comes off as smug, even arrogant. Is nuclear power a green solution? Why world tilts toward ‘yes.’īut not everyone is a fan. In such a climate, Emerson and Thoreau’s brand of do-it-yourself spirituality might be getting a lift. Mainline church attendance is down, and during the pandemic, many householders reconnected with backyard nature. It’s no surprise, perhaps, that American literature’s preeminent transcendentalists have a renewed profile these days.
Cramer, whose 2019 “Solid Seasons” provides an account of the Emerson-Thoreau friendship, and Laura Dassow Walls, who wrote the masterwork 2017 biography “Henry David Thoreau.” Gross, who’s been working on this book for decades, follows recent studies of the period by Jeffrey S. Though difficult to define, transcendentalist philosophy promotes a direct relation with nature for spiritual enlightenment rather than the central authority of organized religion. While “The Minutemen” documented the battle for political independence among 18th-century residents of Concord, Massachusetts, “The Transcendentalists” follows a corresponding struggle among that community’s 19th-century townsfolk for intellectual independence.Īt the center of the story are Ralph Waldo Emerson and his protégé, Henry David Thoreau, who championed transcendentalism as a way to break with dogmas of the Old World so that Americans would be empowered to think for themselves. Gross is up to something similar in “The Transcendentalists and Their World,” a kind of sequel to his landmark work. Rather than telling the story through accounts of a few Founding Fathers, Gross dramatically broadened his narrative to include rank-and-file colonists, “recovering,” writes Gross, “the thoughts and actions of common folk.” This kind of social history, a revolution of its own when “The Minutemen” appeared, is now a part of the literary mainstream. Gross published “The Minutemen and Their World,” a groundbreaking piece of scholarship about the origins of the American Revolution.