American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Th

by Susan Cheever

Book Overview

The 1850s were heady times in Concord, Massachusetts: in a town where a woman's petticoat drying on an outdoor line was enough to elicit scandal, some of the greatest minds of our nation's history were gathering in three of its wooden houses to establish a major American literary movement. The Transcendentalists, as these thinkers came to be called, challenged the norms of American society with essays, novels, and treatises whose beautifully rendered...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743264614
• ISBN13: 9780743264617
• Release Date: December 2006
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 223 Pages
• Weight: 0.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.6" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Where writers bloomed

"Location. Location. Location." That is supposedly the chant that realtors or business people are always intoning when they consider what will make a house or a business succeed. Now, how about this location? Concord, Massachusetts ... in the mid eighteen hundreds, when it earned its reputation as "the biggest little place in America". A quiet and unexceptional, rather quaint New England town on the outside; but inside, behind the doors of the cottages and mansions and farmhouses of Concord, a roiling river of new thought, bold ideas, and superb creative talent. How could it be otherwise when no less illustrious Americans than Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne lived there, pretty much all at the same time? And those are just the biggest names; there were many less famous but equally exciting personalities such as Margaret Fuller, an early practitioner of liberated womanhood ,whose lives also intersected, often passionately, with the Concord luminaries. American Bloomsbury, by Susan Cheever, is aptly named. Taking its title from the Bloomsbury neighborhood in early twentieth Century London that nurtured such creative talents as Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and Vita Sackville-West, American Bloomsbury demonstrates that Concord, Massachusetts, from 1840 to 1868 contributed its own astonding galaxy of writers and philosophers. First there was Emerson, philosopher and writer, gentleman, and in many ways, the support both emotionally and financially for the other writers of Concord. It was Emerson who helped Thoreau find a place to live, whether in the Emerson house or later in a little one room shack at the edge of a pond that Thoreau would later immortalize. It was Emerson who helped the young Hawthornes get themselves established and Emerson who time and again came to the aid of the impulsive and impecunious Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May. Through all this generosity, Emerson somehow avoided the curse of the generous; he never seems to have aroused the jealousy of the friends he so kindly and tirelessly assisted. Thoreau enjoyed Emerson's friendship. He also maintained a very warm friendship with Emerson's wife Lidian and at times seems to have stolen the affection of Emerson's wife and children. Thoreau also captured the heart of the young Louisa May Alcott, who when she wasn't mooning over Henry seems also to have developed a passion for Emerson as well. Emerson meanwhile seemed to have been strongly attracted to the writer/feminist Margaret Fuller, and she in turn seemed quite giddy about the handsome Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose delicate semi-invalid wife seems to have been his second choice, rather than his heart's original desire. Wow! Are we talking Peyton Place or Concord, Mass? It's hard to tell at times, but this book does a wonderful job of taking the stuffiness out of these literary icons and presenting them as flesh and blood human beings who from their little villag

Charming twenty first century glance into our all-too-neglected intellectual past

As a "common reader" without special knowledge of the historical period covered by American Bloomsbury, I can't comment on its closeness to historical fact. But, while I sympathize with the reviewer who said "_American Bloomsbury_ [is] rife with factual errors," I think it is intellectually lazy and even dishonest to simply tell us that a book is full of errors but not show us any. (Did Susan pull your hair in school?) There is certainly a place for fictionalized history. After all, Gore Vidal made his reputation writing it and a generation ago some lesser lights such as James Michener made fortunes doing it. Cheever says, about "Little Women", "[It], as many great books do, hovers in the gap between art and life--just alive enough so that we can recognize ourselves in its pages, just artistic enough so that we can find the lives we read about completely satisfying." That is clearly where Cheever's book "hovers." The last sentence of the book reads, "This book is taken from that imagined landscape, the landscape of a Concord where five people tangled with each other and the world and wrote the books that still inspire us. It is my hope that this story will serve as a introduction to that landscape and that the reader will come to love it as I have." Most people who have had the pleasure and opportunity to become experts in any area of history, don't like historical fiction about their special fields of study: it seems to them like a skein of badly woven prejudices and hopeless projections. But Cheever didn't write for them. For the rest of us, the intuitions of a lover of the literature and history of this period, and of the daughter of a famous American author, combined with an admirable literary style, are sufficient.

This is a Treasure of a Book; Don't miss it!

Good Grief! Heavens to Betsy! There are some errors of fact in this wonderful book, American Bloomsbury! This revelation is part of the new national game of "Gotcha" and not to be viewed with any real seriousness. The blame rests not with Cheever but with the fact checkers at her publishers, who were clearly out to lunch. I am currently reading American Bloomsbury, and finding it to be an utterly absorbing description of the lives, loves and strong beliefs of the Transcendentalists. Having read these authors from my childhood throughout my life, I have been enthralled by the author's relaxed depiction of their varying backgrounds; of the context in which they wrote their great works, and of the ways in which they interacted with and affected one-another. This is a treasure of a book; don't miss it.

Reminds me of Nancy Mitford

I thought this book was an absolutely wonderful read. Devoid of pedantry, it reminded me a little of Nancy Mitford in that it was a light, airy, and often wry look at historical figures -- who are in this case America's founding writers. A marvelous book club selection.

A compelling biography of some of the greatest writers in American literature

"What a shock," writes Susan Cheever in AMERICAN BLOOMSBURY about her arrival in Concord, Massachusetts. "Somehow, I had thought I would be driving into the nineteenth century." Instead of seeing Ralph Waldo Emerson talking with Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne brooding in his study, Bronson and Louisa May Alcott greeting guests at Orchard House, or Henry David Thoreau crossing the street near Monument Square, only the ghosts of these writers remain. Cheever was in the small, Colonial-era town on a mission: to recreate the bygone days of one of the most transformative periods in American history and bring the personal stories of these literary icons to life in AMERICAN BLOOMSBURY. Her journey to Concord began when she was asked to write the Introduction to a new edition of Louisa May Alcott's LITTLE WOMEN, one of her favorite childhood books. She immersed herself in mid-19th century Concord, penned the Introduction and "kept on writing." During the course of her research, she realized that she had found the topic for her next book: the salacious side of the lives of the luminaries who once called Concord home. According to Cheever, the author of several novels and nonfiction books, this was no staid group of bookish types. Along with writing some of the greatest works in the pantheon of American literature and forming many of the ideals that became the basis of modern social thought and education, Emerson and company were involved in love triangles, feuds, misunderstandings and tragedies. An intriguing aspect of AMERICAN BLOOMSBURY is the light Cheever sheds on the least famous of the subjects covered in the book: magazine editor and foreign correspondent Margaret Fuller, a bright, determined woman ahead of her time who captured the fancy of both Emerson and Hawthorne. (Fuller is the model for Hester Prynne in THE SCARLET LETTER.) Another lesser known detail is the support Emerson, Bronson Alcott and others in their circle --- who abhorred slavery and supported the abolitionist movement --- gave to John Brown in spite of the fact that Brown cold-bloodedly called five proslavery men from their homes and executed them. The Concord set endured their share of misfortune along with fame. Emerson lost his nine-year-old son, Henry David Thoreau's brother contracted tetanus after cutting himself while shaving, and Elizabeth Alcott (the inspiration for Beth in LITTLE WOMEN) died at the age of 23 from the lingering effects of scarlet fever. And perhaps most tragically, Margaret Fuller, her Italian husband and their infant son drowned when the steamer on which they sailed from Europe went off course and struck a sandbar near the coast of Fire Island, New York. We know these writers primarily through the works they left behind --- LITTLE WOMEN, WALDEN and THE SCARLET LETTER among them. In this compelling biography, Cheever scratches the surface of history to reveal an extraordinary place and time populated not by static figures but by colorful chara