From Barnes & Noble
In this delightfully dishy romp through literary history, biographer Susan Cheever speculates that 19th-century Concord, Massachusetts, was not just the hub of the nation's intellectual and artistic life but a seething cauldron of passions -- creative and otherwise! Restoring full-blooded perspective to five men and women who comprised America's first great literary generation, Cheever reveals the intimate details of their intertwined lives and complicated romantic entanglements. Yet beneath the "Page Six" tidbits about love affairs, jealousies, and betrayals lurks serious scholarship. American Bloomsbury provides rare insight into the cross-pollination of Transcendental ideals that sparked some of our most enduring masterworks. Popular history at its irresistible best!
Publishers Weekly
This beguiling book is Cheever's exploration of the extraordinary cross-fertilization of creativity in Concord, Mass., during the mid-19th century, when Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and the Alcotts lived as neighbors there. If it won't offer much new information for serious students of American literature, it does provide a lively and insightful introduction to the personalities and achievements of the men and women who were seminal figures in America's literary renaissance, and who, Cheever theorizes, influenced the social activism of succeeding generations. In episodic chapters, Cheever describes their entwined relationships. Margaret Fuller was their brilliant, free-spirited muse and a model for Hester Prynne. Louisa May Alcott, was forced to support her family because her feckless father, Bronson, had no intention of doing so. Herman Melville briefly entered the enchanted circle through his friendship with Hawthorne. Cheever touches on their love affairs and intellectual platonic attractions, their high-minded idealism, their personal losses, their intermittent misunderstandings and jealousies, the years of penury suffered by all except Emerson and their full-fledged tragedies-such as Margaret Fuller's drowning. While Cheever sometimes indulges in high-flown speculation about their personal lives, she keenly analyzes the positive and negative ways they influenced one another's ideas and beliefs and the literature that came out of "this sudden outbreak of genius." 8 pages of photos. (Jan.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Cheever (Note Found in a Bottle) here offers a brilliantly evocative glimpse into life in Concord, MA, from about 1840 to the mid-1860s, when such luminaries as Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau lived, worked, and loved. More than a mere study of the Transcendentalist movement, this intriguing volume examines the dynamic relationships among these remarkable men and women, who constituted what may be considered the first American literary community. Cheever convincingly establishes their work as pivotal in shaping modern thought on the environment and the importance of self. As a skilled novelist in her own right, she effortlessly disentangles the complicated relationships that existed among these five authors, transporting the reader into their world. Would Thoreau have written Walden without the benefit of Emerson's continued financial support? Would Hawthorne have written The Scarlet Letter had Fuller not been there to serve as the model for Hester Prynne? Through Cheever's masterly storytelling, Alcott, Emerson, Fuller, Hawthorne, and Thoreau come alive as individuals, their strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes, and dreams and doubts exposed. Essential reading for anyone with an interest in American letters. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 8/06.]-Anthony Pucci, Notre Dame H.S., Elmira, NY Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
An oddly hyperventilating chronicle of "America's first literary community" in mid-19th-century Concord, which novelist/biographer Cheever (My Name Is Bill, 2004, etc.) sees as a forerunner of 1960s radicalism. The de facto adult and banker of the Massachusetts literary colony was Emerson, who not only edited (with Fuller) the Transcendental movement's flagship publication, The Dial, but also lured the others to Concord by offering them money or the use of a home. The achievements of the group that gathered around him, as outlined by Cheever, represent the foundations of American literature: a classic memoir (Thoreau's Walden), a novel of domesticity (Alcott's Little Women) and fiction detailing the dark side of Puritanism (anything by Hawthorne). Cheever's lush descriptions of the New England locale will make readers want to drive up there immediately. Shrewd about the group's penchant for self-reinvention (Alcott's father was originally surnamed Alcox, for example), the author is also quick to note the hilarity of their contradictions (Thoreau once accidentally set fire to 300 acres of woodland and pastures). She likens the Transcendentalists to hippies: interested in nature, questioning about religion, unorthodox in child-raising habits and vegetarian. Above all, in her view, the group flouted marital mores. That's where the narrative goes awry. To be sure, Hawthorne dumped fiancee Elizabeth Peabody for her younger sister, Sophia. But despite Cheever's assertions, surviving documentation shows that Hawthorne's relationship with Fuller was less ardent than ambivalent, and there's no indication that Emerson consummated his relationship with Fuller either. It's also hard to take seriouslythe arguments of someone who writes so sloppily: Cheever labels John Brown a "violent murderer," and favors us with such overripe passages as a bodice-ripping evocation of "the madness that envelops lovers on hot summer nights." Despite the best intentions, this literary portrait does a disservice to the intellects it seeks to honor. Agent: Kim Witherspoon/InkWell Management
From the Publisher
"A lively and insightful introduction to the personalities and achievements of the men and women who were seminal figures in America's literary renaissance." —-Publishers Weekly
