The Transcendentalists and Their World
by Robert A. Gross (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $40)
Tiny Concord, Mass., was, in the 1830s and ’40s, “a surprising hub of genius,” said Randall Fuller in The Wall Street Journal. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who were friends, left behind transcendentalist writings that “remain some of the most important literary and philosophical statements in U.S. history,” and the village of 2,000 was simultaneously home to the novelists Nathaniel Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott. Historian Robert Gross, who won a Bancroft Prize nearly a half century ago for a study of Concord that illuminated why its residents took up arms against the British, has now published an 800-page companion volume that seeks to explain why Concord gave rise to Emerson and Thoreau’s enduring ideas, which promote suspicion of social institutions and celebrate individual self-reliance. The story begins before either man was even born, and “in Gross’ telling, the first two decades of the 19th century predict the nation we live in today.”
Gross’ deep immersion in Concord’s marginalia “brings warm life to local history,” said Mark Greif in The Atlantic. His previous work taught him that the will to fight the American Revolution grew out of tightly knit communities such as 1775 Concord. Here, his goal is to explain how, in that same town, a school of thought emerged that questioned the value of putting community above self. He doesn’t present Concord as unique. But in the years 1790 to 1850, he detects in the town a steady erosion of social unity that he attributes to a maturing capitalist economy, changing travel and communications technologies, and the rise of national party politics. Though the many residents he memorializes with detailed life stories often display loyalty to family and neighborhood, all were also adjusting to an economy that encouraged individualism, and the transcendentalist creed spoke to them.
Gross frequently loses sight of Emerson and Thoreau, said Dan Cryer in The Boston Globe. “His narrative of town life too often becomes an end in itself and overwhelms any relation to the transcendentalists” or to their key ideas: that divinity resides in every person and the purpose of life is to journey toward self-knowledge. Still, “it’s hard not to respect this labor of a lifetime.” The book “requires the most patient of readers,” but across its many pages, it does offer a view from the ground up of the world that produced two of our most influential writers. On balance, it will stand as “an essential work on these towering figures of American literature.”