The Transcendentalists and Their World

Starred review from August 30, 2021
Historian Gross (The Minutemen and Their World) provides a rich and immersive portrait of 19th-century Concord, Mass., and the Transcendentalist movement that originated there. Aiming to place Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other Transcendentalists “in the context of the town in which they lived and wrote,” Gross documents the “promises and pitfalls” of Thoreau’s pencil-making father, John Thoreau, and other businessmen due to the region’s expanding economy (“Trade curses every thing it handles,” Thoreau would later write in Walden). Gross also delves into the subscription libraries, debating societies, and lecture series that connected community members to the wider world, and details how Emerson’s “call for self-reliance” was a bridge too far for many would-be Transcendentalists in Concord who still believed in the “ancient social ethic of New England.” Thoreau, however, was “drawn apart from his townsmen” and toward Emerson, as the two men “struggled for ways to reconcile the new freedom of individuals with the older claims of interdependence for the common good.” Seamlessly integrating a wealth of primary and secondary sources into his narrative, Gross brings 19th-century New England to vivid life and portrays the personal dynamics between Transcendentalism’s leading figures with insight. This sweeping study brilliantly illuminates a crucial period in American history.

Starred review from September 1, 2021

Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts--these influential writers and thinkers were all associated with American Transcendentalism, and all lived in Concord, MA. Gross reconstructs the community and its spirit in a book that reveals not a peaceful, leafy-green village but a place of intellectual ferment in a rapidly changing America. Gross's Bancroft Prize-winning The Minutemen and Their World, first published in 1976, will be reissued simultaneously with this book. With a 20,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 15, 2021
The history of a flourishing 19th-century village that gave rise to transformative thought. Conceived as a sequel of sorts to Gross' acclaimed The Minutemen and Their World (1976), this book is a deeply researched inquiry into the idea of individualism as expressed and grappled with by the two most famous transcendentalists, Emerson and Thoreau, among many others in 19th-century New England. Drawing on prodigious scholarly and archival sources, Gross creates a vibrant portrait of Concord, Massachusetts, as a thriving village that, from the 1820s to the 1840s, confronted evolving intellectual, economic, social, political, and spiritual pressures as well as contentious issues that drove townspeople "into mutually suspicious enclaves," frayed bonds of community, and undermined an "ideology of interdependence" inherited from the Puritans. In the 1820s and '30s, Concord prospered, with factories producing cloth from cotton picked by Southern slaves; a pencil factory, owned by Thoreau's family; a circulating library, debating club, and lyceum; bustling shops; and, notably, the exclusive, influential Social Circle, "a self-selecting club of the local elite," open only by nomination (Emerson proudly joined in 1839). Gross' large, colorful cast of characters includes conflicting religious leaders, such as Congregationalist Ezra Ripley and Calvinist Lyman Beecher; African American artisans, Irish immigrants, and local farmers; and reform-minded women who energetically took up the cause of abolition, to which Emerson--unlike Thoreau--came late. Thoreau, Gross writes, "captured the driving forces of the day," including the invasive "iron horse" (Emerson, unlike Thoreau, was an early supporter of the railroad and bought railroad stock), modern communications, the need for better schools, and "the moral and spiritual failures of church and state, the problematic programs of the reformers, and the loss of wildness in nature." Gross incisively examines Emerson's "masculine version of individualism," which was offensive to his wife; Thoreau's apparent retreat from social life; and both men's changing conception of the individual within a matrix of social obligations and sustaining community. A vigorous, compelling American history.

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