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Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work
Simon and Schuster
December 2006
On Sale: December 19, 2006
240 pages
ISBN: 0743264614
EAN: 9780743264617
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Even the most devoted readers of nineteenth-century
American literature often assume that the men and women
behind the masterpieces were as dull and staid as the era's
static daguerreotypes. Susan Cheever's latest work, however,
brings new life to the well-known literary personages who
produced such cherished works as The Scarlet Letter,
Moby-Dick, Walden, and Little Women. Rendering in full color
the tumultuous, often scandalous lives of these volatile and
vulnerable geniuses, Cheever's dynamic narrative reminds us
that, while these literary heroes now seem secure of their
spots in the canon, they were once considered avant-garde,
bohemian types, at odds with the establishment. These remarkable men and women were so improbably
concentrated in placid Concord, Massachusetts, that Henry
James referred to the town as the "biggest little place in
America." Among the host of luminaries who floated in and
out of Concord's "American Bloomsbury" as satellites of the
venerable intellect and prodigious fortune of Ralph Waldo
Emerson were Henry David Thoreau -- perpetual second to his
mentor in both love and career; Louisa May Alcott -- dreamy
girl and ambitious spinster; Nathaniel Hawthorne --
dilettante and cad; and Margaret Fuller -- glamorous editor
and foreign correspondent. Perhaps inevitably, given the smallness of the place and the
idiosyncrasies of its residents, the members of the
prestigious circle became both intellectually and
romantically entangled: Thoreau serenaded an infatuated
Louisa on his flute. Vying with Hawthorne for Fuller's
attention, Emerson wrote the fiery feminist love letters
while she resided (yards away from his wife) in his guest
room. Herman Melville was, according to some, ultimately
driven mad by his consuming and unrequited affection for
Hawthorne. Far from typically Victorian, this group of intellectuals,
like their British Bloomsbury counterparts to whom the title
refers, not only questioned established literary forms, but
also resisted old moral and social strictures. Thoreau, of
course, famously retreated to a plot of land on Walden Pond
to escape capitalism, pick berries, and ponder nature. More
shocking was the group's ambivalence toward the institution
of marriage. Inclined to bend the rules of its bonds, many
of its members spent time at the notorious commune, Brook
Farm, and because liberal theories could not entirely
guarantee against jealousy, the tension of real or imagined
infidelities was always near the surface. Susan Cheever reacquaints us with the sexy, subversive side
of Concord's nineteenth-century intellectuals, restoring in
three dimensions the literary personalities whose work is at
the heart of our national history and cultural identity.
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