American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel...

American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry ... | Susan Cheever | American Bloomsbury

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American Bloomsbur...

	American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry ... Susan Cheever Simon & Schuster, 2007 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 37 reviews view larger image
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The 1850s were heady times in Concord, Massachusetts: in a town where a woman's petticoat drying on an outdoor line was enough to elicit scandal, some of the greatest minds of our nation's history were gathering in three of its wooden houses to establish a major American literary movement. The Transcendentalists, as these thinkers came to be called, challenged the norms of American society with essays, novels, and treatises whose beautifully rendered prose and groundbreaking assertions still resonate with readers today. Though noted contemporary author Susan Cheever stands in awe of the monumental achievements of such writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Louisa May Alcott, her personal, evocative narrative removes these figures from their dusty pedestals and provides a lively account of their longings, jealousies, and indiscretions. Thus, Cheever reminds us that the passion of Concord's ambitious and temperamental resident geniuses was by no means confined to the page....

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What your textbook never told you!

Ms. Cheever makes you want to read...or perhaps reread and understand for the first time...the works of writers who shaped American thought and history.

American Bloomsbury

Ah! This was a delightful book with historical significance! I had no idea of the literary talent concentrated in Concord, MA during an important time in our nation's history--the 1840-60's+. Susan Cleever wrote an entertaining "story" about our most prominent storytellers.

American Bloomsbury is an intimate look at the lives of the nineteenth century New England Transcendalists

Susan Cheever has written a short book on the lives of the famed New England transcendentalists who were in the vanguard of the literary renaissance of nineteenth century America. The book is not profound but makes for good bedtime reading.
The less than 300 page book focuses on the literary geniuses who lived in Concord west of Boston in the mid-nineteenth century:
1. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the father of the transcendentalist movement in America. Emerson (1803-1882) left he Unitarian pulpit due to his unorthodox views even for that liberal denomination. He was a great essayists and orator who travled widely in America and abroad. His great friend Thoreau may have been in love with Emerson's wife Lidian. Emerson died with alzheimer's disease. He was a relatively wealthy man who aided many of his poorer transcendentalists. He believed in Nature and the divine in each human being as preferable to belief in the God of the Bible. His work was influenced by such writers as Thomas Carlyle and philosophers such as Immanuel Kant who believed in the moral imperative.
Emerson was sometimes called the "American Plato".
2. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) is famous for "Walden" reporting on his life near Walden Pond in a cabin owned by his friend Emerson. Thoreau was a Harvard graduate, a naturalist and an opponent of slavery. He was friendly with the mad abolitionist John Brown. Throreau was jailed for failure to pay his taxes. He condemned the Mexican War as a land grab which would add slave states to the Union. Thoreau never married; he and his older brother John were in love with the same woman who dumped both of them! He died of TB at a young age.
3. Margaret Fuller died at age 50 being drowned in a shipwreck near Fire Island. She had returned to America with her Italian lover and her baby. Margaret was an early feminist who may have had affairs with both Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Her book on the life of women in the nineteenth century has become a classic. She was the probable model for the character of Hester Prynne in the Hawthorne classic "The Scarlet Letter."
She was brilliant, beautiful and a woman living before her time!
4. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)was born in Salem site of the infamous witchcraft trials of the seventeenth century.
Hawthorne married Sophie Peabody one of the famed women rights and abolitionists sisters. In his early married life he lived in the Old Manse owned by Emerson. He was involved in politics supporting his Bowdoin college friend Franklin Pierce. After Democratic candidate Pierce was sworn in as the 14th president his friend Hawthorne was appointed as US Consul in Liverpool. Hawthorne had a happy marriage and loved his two children. he did have an amorous interest in the fetching Margaret Fuller.
Hawthorne is best known for his novels "The House of the Seven Gables,"; "The Scarlet Letter" and "The Marble Faun." His novel "The Blithedale Romance" is a roman a clef based on the months he lived at the utopian experimental Brook Farm. The character of "Zenobia" in that work is also a picture of Margaret Fuller. Hawthorne could be cold and reclusive but is one of our first great authors. Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" is dedicated to Hawthorne in token of their friendship.
5. Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) was the tomboy daughter of the eccentric Bronson Alcott who established the utopian community of "Fruitlands." Alcott grew up in a poor family which was often supported by friends most notably Ralph Waldon Emerson. Louisa May served as a nurse in the Civil War writing "Hospital Sketches" of her time in New York nursing Union wounded. She contracted mercury poisoning and died a few days after her father in 1888. She is best known for the immortal "Little Women."
Cheever reports on her love for the transcendentalists and their friends. She tells us how she enjoys their work and relates stories of the visits she and her family have made to Concord.
This book is not a scholarly dissection of the works of these New England intellectuals. It is one woman's loving account of the personal lives of these New England geniuses.

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Pleasant, gently informative reading

AMERICAN BLOOMSBURY is a study of the "genius cluster" centered in Concord, Massachusetts, 1835 - 1888, beginning with the arrival of Ralph Waldo Emerson and ending with the death of the last of the neighborhood's classic writers in the neighborhood. With the inheritance from a short-lived first wife from a wealthy family, Emerson largely supported friends like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, the Alcott family and Margaret Fuller as they launched their careers. They shared Transcendentalism and a passion for intellectual pursuit. As in most close-knit communities, they had their intrigues, jealousies and fall-outs. The hope and beauty of a New England spring day is reflected in their early ambitions and again in their salutes to one another at the end of their lives. The themes they drew on, the events they witnessed at home and abroad, and the impact of the Civil War articulate the greater American experience of the 19th century.

Though I'm very familiar with the writers' works, I hadn't studied their lives closely and this was a good general introduction, often full of surprises. Cheever vividly evokes the personages and setting with a storyteller's skill. I did not realize how fully she developed them until I felt the pang of loss as their mortality set in. This is by no means exhaustive biography or history; in fact, Cheever moves through it rather breathlessly. Her style is intended for a very general audience, not an academic one.

The book is not perfect. Although she moves from 1835 to the last death, of Louisa May Alcott who is only a child at the outset, Cheever chooses to order her information around themes or events in their lives, which do not necessarily flow chronologically. She kind of swirls around and around as she moves through the 19th century. In one chapter, even one paragraph, she may bounce back and forth between several years. The coming of the railroad is experienced more than once, though from slightly different perspectives. Poor Margaret Fuller drowns at least 3 times. Sometimes you are left asking, now when exactly is this happening? Her chapters are quite short, 3 - 5 pages, which makes for a rather breakneck pace through the facts. She provides a time line, plenty of research notes and citations and an extensive bibliography at the back of the book that help answer questions that may arise.

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An intriguing imaginative reconstruction of the intersecting lives of transcendentalists in Concord

This book has a lot to recommend it as an introduction to several brilliant individuals whose lives crossed paths in Concord, Massachusetts between about 1840 and 1870. It is an enjoyable, easy read -- with very short chapters that are organized around themes and encounters rather than strict chronology. The book brings these characters to life, reading between the lines of letters, books and journals to capture their unspoken thoughts and feelings for each other. It shows how the lives and thoughts of these thinkers, who rarely mention one another or acknowledge their debts to each other in their published works, are deeply intertwined. It also makes a serious effort to take them out of "ancient" history and show how their concerns and conceptions are not so far away from our own.

It is this concern, however, to show the relevance of the lives of people like Thoreau, Emerson, Fuller, Hawthorne, Bronson and Louisa Alcott, that also accounts for several of the major weaknesses of the book. Ms. Cheever tries so hard to show that these individuals are just like us that the book reads almost like tabloid journalism -- especially in the first several chapters. I was reminded several times as I read the book of Goethe's maxim that "no one is a hero to his valet" -- that from a certain perspective even the most distinctive individuals look like ordinary folk who have passions and drives and needs and just happen to be in the right place at the right time. Only rarely does the book give a hint at what makes these individuals remarkable -- although the author is obviously fascinated by them, her descriptions of them make them seem just like peculiar and idiosyncratic folk with a sense of grandeur and peculiar ideas that made them stand out against the norm but not much more. I never got a clear sense from the book of how the ideas of these thinkers connect with their lives, and the book never gives a clear sense of what their ideas were beyond very superficial descriptions. The account of Emerson suggests again and again that apart from being charismatic and a clever writer, his most important contribution was to have inherited enough money from his first marriage to enable him to be generous with the others and create a community around him. I never saw any indication that Cheever had any idea how powerful and radical Emerson's thought really was. (Her suggestion that Thoreau and the rest of the transcendentalists were leeches on Emerson is one of many examples where Cheever chooses which of the many existing rumors to believe and report as if it were fact rather than making sure it is -- at least in the case of Thoreau, this rumor is clearly false -- as Walter Harding has shown in his excellent biography, Thoreau was very careful not to owe anything and worked hard in his father's pencil factory or later in life at surveying or even manual labor to take care of his needs, and even made sure to pay rent when he was living in his parents' house as a boarder, and had agreed with Emerson to do work around the house in exchange for room and board when he lived with him).

Part of the problem is that Ms. Cheever can't seem to decide whether she wants to write a tabloid style expose of the love lives of the Concord geniuses, or a popular history, or a personal account of her own fascination with that history. In the last half of the book Ms. Cheever figures more and more prominently in the book -- her personal feelings and responses to the history begin to overwhelm that history. For example, she can have no sympathy whatsoever for (and no clear understanding of) the Concord thinkers' admiration for John Brown -- because she cannot understand why they would have seen him as anything else than what she sees him to be: a cold-hearted murderer, whose passionate ideals led to outrageous and insane actions. In the end, I think that the best way to describe this book is not as a genuine history, but as an imaginative attempt to tell the story of these characters that Ms. Cheever had come to love in a way that made sense of them to her. While there is value in such an approach, it should not be mistaken for an accurate history. As other reviewers note, she invents a great deal and reads a great deal into things that may not be there (e.g. Alcott's admiration for Thoreau and Emerson is read as her having fallen in love with her teacher and her father's friend). The book is also in need of some serious editing -- there are several parenthetical points or asides or statements of fact irrelevant to the paragraphs or chapters in which they are included. Several words are misused consistently throughout ("insure" is used when she means "ensure," for example).

I did enjoy reading this book quite a bit -- I'd read Emerson and Thoreau and read biographies of both, but had never read an account of all the remarkable people whose lives connected in Concord. It is a quick and easy read -- and gives a valuable shorthand version of the period that I will definitely want to flesh out by reading some of the other biographies and history that she relied upon and mentions in her notes at the end. Ms. Cheever obviously cares about the people she writes about -- and it would be hard to walk away from this volume without likewise caring.

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