From the eminent and award-winning historian Robert A. Gross comes his
long-awaited, immersive journey through Concord in the age of Emerson
and Thoreau, The Transcendentalists and Their World.
One of The Wall Street Journal's 10 Best Books of 2021
Why Concord? How did a small and seemingly quiet village in the
hinterlands of Boston become, by popular reckoning, the birthplace of
two revolutions--the American War of Independence that began with shots
fired by the local Minutemen, and the American Renaissance of literature
and thought that began with the Transcendentalists' challenge to
established pieties? In The Transcendentalists and Their World, the
distinguished historian Robert A. Gross gives a rich and beautifully
detailed account of the town that Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David
Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Alcotts called home. Their
Concord, he shows, was primed for revolt, and was hardly a sleepy,
bucolic place fit only for poets and philosophers.
The Transcendentalists and their neighbors lived in an age of
transformation. A place of more than two thousand souls in the
antebellum era, Concord was a community in ferment, one whose small,
ordered society, founded by Puritans and defended by Minutemen, was
dramatically unsettled by the expansive forces of capitalism and
democracy while the town became more tightly integrated with the wider
world. These changes posed a challenge to a society built on inherited
institutions and involuntary associations as citizens placed a new
premium on autonomy and choice. Concord was ripe for Emerson and
Thoreau.
The Transcendentalists and Their World is both an intimate journey
into the life of a town and a searching cultural study of major American
writers as they plumbed the reaches of the universe for spiritual
truths--and took stock of the rapidly changing contours of their
surroundings. It shows us familiar literary figures alongside their
neighbors--white and Black, devout and blasphemous, and situated at
every level of the social order--and it reveals how this common life in
Concord entered powerfully into their works. No American community has
been recovered so richly and located so meaningfully within the larger
American story.
