The Transcendentalists and Their World Hardcover – November 9, 2021 by Robert A. Gross

Description

Author: Gross Robert A.

Brand: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Package Dimensions: 44x236x1050

Number Of Pages: 864

Release Date: 09-11-2021

Details: Product Description

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.

Review

“Gross has delivered a second harvest of his career-long work. It is a measured, beautiful volume that brings warm life, accuracy, and complexity to local history, swooping between the bird’s-eye view and the tracery of many individual destinies . . . Absorbing . . . Illuminating.” ―Mark Greif, The Atlantic”Concord is the subject of Robert Gross’s monumental The Transcendentalists and Their World, easily the most comprehensive work ever written about the town’s social history during the transcendentalist era . . . Gross’s historiography is patient, thorough, cumulative . . . Gross’s richly detailed account shows us how such a surprising conjunction of place and thought could occur.” ―Randall Fuller, The Wall Street Journal”Gross ably depicts how Concord shaped [Emerson and Thoreau], and how they also departed from town norms . . . It’s hard not to respect this labor of a lifetime. [Gross’s] scholarship, based on research in many other libraries as well, is impeccable . . . An essential work on these towering figures of American literature.” ―Dan Cryer, The Boston Globe”A magisterial, sprawling portrait of the corners of 19th-century America that fostered a revolution of thinking about individualism and democracy. It’s an engrossing study of radical ideas reaching everyday people.” ―Chicago Tribune“[Robert A. Gross] is an archival lion, bent on leaving no ort, scrap, or fragment behind. The prose is understated and shapely, the footnotes Homeric. Social detail accretes like a coral reef. Gross is especially good at recovering moments that deliver a short, sharp shock to postmodern sensib