One of The Wall Street Journal's 10 best books of 2021
One of Air Mail's 10 best books of 2021
**Winner of the Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize
**
In the year of the nation's bicentennial, Robert A. Gross published The
Minutemen and Their World, a paradigm-shaping study of Concord,
Massachusetts, during the American Revolution. It won the prestigious
Bancroft Prize and became a perennial bestseller. Forty years later, in
this highly anticipated work, Gross returns to Concord and explores the
meaning of an equally crucial moment in the American story: the rise of
Transcendentalism.
The Transcendentalists and Their World offers a fresh view of the
thinkers whose outsize impact on philosophy and literature would spread
from tiny Concord to all corners of the earth. Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Alcotts called this
New England town home, and Thoreau drew on its life extensively in his
classic Walden. But Concord from the 1820s through the 1840s was no
pastoral place fit for poets and philosophers.
The Transcendentalists and their neighbors lived through a
transformative epoch of American life. A place of two thousand-plus
souls in the antebellum era, Concord was a community in ferment, whose
small, ordered society founded by Puritans and defended by Minutemen was
dramatically unsettled through the expansive forces of capitalism and
democracy and tightly integrated into the wider world. These changes
challenged a world of inherited institutions and involuntary
associations with a new premium on autonomy and choice. They exposed
people to cosmopolitan currents of thought and endowed them with
unparalleled opportunities. They fostered uncertainties, raised new
hopes, stirred dreams of perfection, and created an audience for new
ideas of individual freedom and democratic equality deeply resonant
today.
The Transcendentalists and Their World is both an intimate journey
into the life of a community and a searching cultural study of major
American writers as they plumbed the depths of the universe for
spiritual truths and surveyed the rapidly changing contours of their own
neighborhoods. It shows us familiar figures in American literature
alongside their neighbors at every level of the social order, and it
reveals how this common life in Concord entered powerfully into their
works. No American community of the nineteenth century has been
recovered so richly and with so acute an awareness of its place in the
larger American story.
