American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work » (Reprint)

Susan Cheever is the bestselling author of eleven previous books, including five novels and the memoirs Note Found in a Bottle and Home Before Dark. Her work has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Boston Globe Winship Medal. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the Corporation of Yaddo, and a member of the Author's Guild Council. She writes a weekly column for Newsday and teaches in the Bennington College M.F.A. program. She lives in New York City with her family.

A brilliant, controversial, and fascinating biography of those who were, in the mid-nineteenth century, the center of American thought and literature.

Publishers Weekly

This beguiling book is Cheever's exploration of the extraordinary cross-fertilization of creativity in Concord, Mass., during the mid-19th century, when Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and the Alcotts lived as neighbors there. If it won't offer much new information for serious students of American literature, it does provide a lively and insightful introduction to the personalities and achievements of the men and women who were seminal figures in America's literary renaissance, and who, Cheever theorizes, influenced the social activism of succeeding generations. In episodic chapters, Cheever describes their entwined relationships. Margaret Fuller was their brilliant, free-spirited muse and a model for Hester Prynne. Louisa May Alcott, was forced to support her family because her feckless father, Bronson, had no intention of doing so. Herman Melville briefly entered the enchanted circle through his friendship with Hawthorne. Cheever touches on their love affairs and intellectual platonic attractions, their high-minded idealism, their personal losses, their intermittent misunderstandings and jealousies, the years of penury suffered by all except Emerson and their full-fledged tragedies-such as Margaret Fuller's drowning. While Cheever sometimes indulges in high-flown speculation about their personal lives, she keenly analyzes the positive and negative ways they influenced one another's ideas and beliefs and the literature that came out of "this sudden outbreak of genius." 8 pages of photos. (Jan.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

A Note to the Reader     xiii
Preface     xv
Part 1
Concord, Massachusetts     3
The Alcotts Arrive for the First Time     7
Louisa, Girl Interrupted     12
Louisa in Love...Henry David Thoreau     16
Sic Vita     20
Two Loves     24
Ellen Sewall     29
Money     32
Emerson Pays for Everything     35
Two Deaths     39
The Curse of Salem     42
Hawthorne Emerges     46
The Execution     49
Another Triangle     53
Part 2
Bronson Alcott, Peddler Turned Pedant     59
Fruitlands     63
Sex     68
Thoreau Goes to New York City     71
Wall of Fire     74
Walden Pond     78
Margaret Fuller, the Sexy Muse     81
Rome     85
The Margaret Ghost     89
Hawthorne Leaves Salem Forever     91
Stockbridge     95
Melville     97
The Railroad     101
Community     104
Without Margaret     106
Part 3
Louisa May Alcott Returns     113
Louisa in Boston     116
Concord Again     120
Walden, Walden     123
Thoreau Now     127
Leaving Walden     130
The Birth and Death of Margaret Fuller     135
Shipwreck     139
The Hawthornes' Return to Concord     144
President Frank     149
Bayonets and Bullets     154
Local Martyr     159
Part 4
The Death of Thoreau     167
Louisa in Washington, D.C.     170
Return and Illness     175
Hawthorne Leaves Concord     181
Death     185
Little Women     188
Emerson and the Fire     193
Concord, Today     198
Chronology     201
Acknowledgments     204
Notes     206
Bibliography     211
Index     215