The Emerson Circle

Reviews / Votes

"A striking group portrait . . . The charming and expansive result renders the contours of many lives with warmth and breadth, and paints a complete portrait of a man who once declared, 'I am a fragment.'" -Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Vivid portrait of the writers who launched American literature . . . Nichols turns up interesting details that are not widely known, from Emerson's certainty that 'the white "race" was destined to dominate the earth' to Thoreau's making his cabin available as a stop on the Underground Railroad. An invigorating work of social and literary history, its learning lightly worn." -Kirkus Reviews "How did a tiny Massachusetts town explode with such intellectual force-setting off a detonation that, only a decade or so later, would deliver the foundational works of American literature and upend American politics? Bruce Nichols offers the most lucid of answers in this vibrant account of our influential early disrupters." -Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author "Bruce Nichols's The Emerson Circle is a richly layered group biography of the visionary and fearless Concord Transcendentalists who birthed the seminal American cultural revolution of the 1830s and beyond. Seamlessly interweaving the lives of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller. Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne and other literary luminaries, Nichols brilliantly grapples with such hot button mid-19th Century topics as slavery, feminism, Utopianism, nature preservation, materialism, industrialism, and the impending Civil War. An impeccable and often dazzling behind-the-scenes look at the Concord iconoclasts clustered around Emerson who helped define what it means to be an American original. Highly recommended!" -Douglas Brinkley, author of Silent Spring Revolution "Wars, a shipwreck, the Underground Railroad, loves, tensions, and above all a thirst to understand the world: this bold venture in group biography brings alive an extraordinary moment and a remarkable circle of people. And it makes the reader feel, as all good history writing does: I wish I had been alive then." -Adam Hochschild, author of American Midnight "A lively, fluent account of extraordinary artists and thinkers in 19th-century Concord whose conflicts, friendships, and rivalries inspired ideas that continue to challenge and empower us." -Eve LaPlante, author of Marmee & Louisa: The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother "Bruce Nichols makes us eavesdroppers on one of the most influential conversations in American history, a colloquy that changed our country in the nineteenth century and shapes it still. His elegant, incisive style lets us fit right in." -H. W. Brands, Pulitzer Prize finalist, author of America First "Ralph Waldo Emerson preached that 'the individual is the world.' But he needed other people to provoke his thoughts, challenge his ideas, and draw him into the political arena. The Emerson Circle vividly portrays how this happened and how, in the process, a small group of like-minded thinkers gathered in the small town of Concord, Massachusetts, in the 1840s and articulated radical new ideas for a nation undergoing-and resisting-dramatic changes in its way of life. The cast of characters-the Alcotts, Emerson, Fuller, Hawthorne, Peabody, and Thoreau-is familiar, but its members stir with fresh life in Bruce Nichols's astute account of how they provoked and influenced one another. Can faith in 'the Newness'-an American vision of democracy, equality, and true individuality-be revived? Let Nichols be your guide, and The Emerson Circle will keep expanding." -Robert A. Gross, author of The Transcendentalists and Their World