This post will conclude my lengthy project on the Transcendentalists…for now. I will be reading more about/from them in the future, but the year is almost over and I have other things I’d like to start reading in January. I have found this project interesting and enlightening, and I’m glad that I decided to wrap […]

American Transcendentalism: A History by Philip F. Gura Nonfiction Hill and Wang, 2008 Paperback 384 pages From the back cover: American Transcendentalism is a comprehensive narrative history of America’s first group of public intellectuals, the men and women who defined American literature and indelibly marked American reform in the decades before and after the Civil […]

In the late summer of 1846, Margaret Fuller traveled to Europe as the foreign correspondent for the New-York Tribune. This was a trip that she had been planning to take on her own for years, but circumstances concerning her family (especially the sudden death of her father in 1835) had prevented her from doing so earlier. […]

Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century was first published in The Dial in 1843 as an essay titled “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men, Woman versus Women.” Some of Fullers friends–particularly Horace Greeley–were so impressed with it that they suggested she expand and rewrite it into a full-length book. She did just that, and […]

In the summer of 1843, Margaret Fuller went on a tour of the Great Lakes; in the mid-nineteenth century this area was considered the far western frontier. Fuller’s travel route was pretty circular, starting and ending in Buffalo, NY. Summer on the Lakes was Fuller’s first full-length book and it detailed her journey: the physical journey […]

(The following biographical information comes from the Introduction to The Essential Margaret Fuller, written by Jeffrey Steele.) Margaret Fuller was born in 1810 in Massachusetts, and was the first child of Timothy (later a congressman) and Margarett. Fuller had eight siblings, two of whom died when they were just over a year old. Fuller’s father was […]

The Essential Margaret Fuller by Margaret Fuller Edited and with an Introduction by Jeffrey Steele Nonfiction / Fiction / Poetry Rutgers University Press, 1992 Paperback 536 pages A couple of weeks ago (November 15th, to be exact) I kicked off Transcendentalist month by starting The Essential Margaret Fuller. I was looking forward to reading Woman […]

Tomorrow starts a month of transcendentalist reading on Between the Covers. Back in August, @JillIsReading, @RoofBeamReader and I started chatting on Twitter about Walden (by Thoreau), and that led to the decision to do a sort of read-along of the transcendentalists over the course of a month. From tomorrow until December 15th, the three of […]

Last night on Twitter, @JillIsReading and @RoofBeamReader were having a conversation about Thoreau’s Walden and how they’d like to read and re-read it, respectively.  I chimed in and told them that Walden is one of my favorites and that I try to read it every Spring, and Jill suggested that we have a read-along.  This […]