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In vivid prose and with keen insights, Robert Gross reveals the legacies of revolution and subsequent commercial transformation in a small town famous for its philosophers. Rich in historical irony, The Transcendentalists and Their World wryly explores how past and present defined intellectuals, who claimed to have freed themselves from both. --Alan Taylor, author of American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850

A rich and immersive portrait of 19th-century Concord, Massachusetts, and the Transcendentalist movement that originated there . . . Seamlessly integrating a wealth of primary and secondary sources into his narrative, Gross brings 19th-century New England to vivid life . . . This sweeping study brilliantly illuminates a crucial period in American history. --Publishers Weekly (starred review) A deeply researched inquiry . . . 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 . . . A vigorous, compelling American history. --Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Award-winning historian Gross looks at the small but not closed world of Concord, Massachusetts, and asks: why did the cultural ideal of individualism come to the front there in the 1830s? . . . [A] lively social and cultural history. --Library Journal (starred review) A thoroughly researched work, Robert Gross's The Transcendentalists and Their World plants you firmly in the rich soil of Concord as an intellectual revolution, containing a uniquely American form of individualism, is established. In this remarkable feat of scholarship, Gross contextualizes the transcendental thinking of Emerson and Thoreau. Their insights--on nature, on resisting the status quo, on being--endure, and this work by Gross will endure as well. --Ken Burns In what amounts to a riveting dual biography of American icons Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Robert A. Gross offers up a history of a small town that is also the history of our nation. Artfully crafted and a pleasure to read, The Transcendentalists and Their World convincingly answers the perennial question, Why Concord? the intellectual flowering known variously as the American Renaissance, American Romanticism, and Transcendentalism, could have begun nowhere else. --Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, The Peabody Sisters, and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast This book is a Hope Diamond of history-writing, a brilliant successor to that little gem, The Minutemen and Their World. Although much larger and richer, this story of Concord in the age of Emerson and Thoreau has the same social and cultural wholeness, the same easy, readable prose, and the same reverberating significance as the earlier book. Well worth waiting for, it is surely the most complete history of an early American town ever written. --Gordon S. Wood, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution and Power and Liberty Concord, Massachusetts was the cultural epicenter of nineteenth-century America, an extraordinarily rich breeding ground of philosophy and literature. No one knows Concord as well as Robert A. Gross. In this ground-breaking, wonderfully researched book, Gross limns the web of personal connections and cultural movements that produced some of America's greatest writings. --David S. Reynolds, author of Walt Whitman's America and Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times Robert Gross's long-awaited magnum opus, packed with insight and exhaustively researched, is essential reading for all readers with a serious interest in Emerson, Thoreau, and the history of New England Transcendentalism. --Lawrence Buell, Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Harvard University An array of Concord, Massachusetts databases--four decades in the making--enable Robert Gross to narrate, for the real people of his town, what Thornton Wilder had to invent for the people of Our Town: astonishing stories of evolving relationships, not just of luminaries like Emerson and Thoreau but of cotton-mill girls, Anti-Masonic demagogues, Black laborers and Irish railroad workers just hanging on in Walden Woods, and Emerson's more radical and (for my money) more interesting Aunt Mary. Gross's stories crackle like the fire you would do well to read them by, just as we would expect from this one-time Newsweek writer and author of the prizewinning Minutemen and their World. Savoring them gives us unprecedented access to the birth of individualism, village capitalism, democracy, religious diversity, women's activism--in short, the modern world. --Woody Holton, author of Liberty is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution This book is a magnificent achievement, combining decades of research with a rare literary grace. While making it look easy, Robert Gross does what is nearly impossible, fusing deep social history with a penetrating analysis of the Transcendentalists and their writing. By grounding these celestial thinkers in a specific patch of earth, he has given a rare gift to his readers, and completed a process that began with The Minutemen and Their World in 1976. It strikes me as an achievement worthy of Emerson and Thoreau themselves. --Ted Widmer, author of Lincoln on the Verge In vivid prose and with keen insights, Robert Gross reveals the legacies of revolution and subsequent commercial transformation in a small town famous for its philosophers. Rich in historical irony, The Transcendentalists and Their World wryly explores how past and present defined intellectuals, who claimed to have freed themselves from both. --Alan Taylor, author of American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850 Robert Gross has given us something radically new: a deep social biography of a place and an idea. Concord, Massachusetts becomes nothing less than a living laboratory for understanding the profound transformation of American life from the common good to individualist self-discovery. The Transcendentalists and Their World is place-based social and intellectual history drawn from under the very feet of the men and women who wrote it. Emerson and Thoreau are here, but so are their friends and neighbors, famous, infamous, and obscure, each of them weaving the pattern of social life through their choices and decisions. The result is fascinating, revelatory--and unsettling, for this book quietly and persistently undermines whole structures of facile assumptions about who the Transcendentalists were, and how America got to be this way. An instant classic. Read it! and get ready to rethink everything you thought you knew. --Laura Dassow Walls, author of Henry David Thoreau: A Life Robert Gross brilliantly portrays the social, religious, and political forces in Concord that nourished what Emerson called 'the fields of my fathers.' By demonstrating how these passions and the men and women behind them shaped the early, productive lives of Emerson and Thoreau, Gross contextualizes as never before the environments in which the Transcendentalists and their literary neighbors like Hawthorne flourished, and how they shaped their interactions with the wider world. If Gross's The Minutemen and Their World followed the road to America's political independence, then this book, his magnum opus, describes and traces the ideas that helped initiate America's s literary and intellectual independence. --Joel Myerson, Carolina Distinguished Professor of American Literature Emeritus at the University of South Carolina, co-author of The Emerson Brothers, and editor of Transcendentalism: A Reader

A rich and immersive portrait of 19th-century Concord, Massachusetts, and the Transcendentalist movement that originated there . . . Seamlessly integrating a wealth of primary and secondary sources into his narrative, Gross brings 19th-century New England to vivid life . . . This sweeping study brilliantly illuminates a crucial period in American history. --Publishers Weekly (starred review) Award-winning historian Gross looks at the small but not closed world of Concord, Massachusetts, and asks: why did the cultural ideal of individualism come to the front there in the 1830s? . . . [A] lively social and cultural history. --Library Journal (starred review) A thoroughly researched work, Robert Gross's The Transcendentalists and Their World plants you firmly in the rich soil of Concord as an intellectual revolution, containing a uniquely American form of individualism, is established. In this remarkable feat of scholarship, Gross contextualizes the transcendental thinking of Emerson and Thoreau. Their insights--on nature, on resisting the status quo, on being--endure, and this work by Gross will endure as well. --Ken Burns In what amounts to a riveting dual biography of American icons Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Robert A. Gross offers up a history of a small town that is also the history of our nation. Artfully crafted and a pleasure to read, The Transcendentalists and Their World convincingly answers the perennial question, Why Concord? the intellectual flowering known variously as the American Renaissance, American Romanticism, and Transcendentalism, could have begun nowhere else. --Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, The Peabody Sisters, and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast This book is a Hope Diamond of history-writing, a brilliant successor to that little gem, The Minutemen and Their World. Although much larger and richer, this story of Concord in the age of Emerson and Thoreau has the same social and cultural wholeness, the same easy, readable prose, and the same reverberating significance as the earlier book. Well worth waiting for, it is surely the most complete history of an early American town ever written. --Gordon S. Wood, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution and Power and Liberty Concord, Massachusetts was the cultural epicenter of nineteenth-century America, an extraordinarily rich breeding ground of philosophy and literature. No one knows Concord as well as Robert A. Gross. In this ground-breaking, wonderfully researched book, Gross limns the web of personal connections and cultural movements that produced some of America's greatest writings. --David S. Reynolds, author of Walt Whitman's America and Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times Robert Gross's long-awaited magnum opus, packed with insight and exhaustively researched, is essential reading for all readers with a serious interest in Emerson, Thoreau, and the history of New England Transcendentalism. --Lawrence Buell, Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Harvard University An array of Concord, Massachusetts databases--four decades in the making--enable Robert Gross to narrate, for the real people of his town, what Thornton Wilder had to invent for the people of Our Town: astonishing stories of evolving relationships, not just of luminaries like Emerson and Thoreau but of cotton-mill girls, Anti-Masonic demagogues, Black laborers and Irish railroad workers just hanging on in Walden Woods, and Emerson's more radical and (for my money) more interesting Aunt Mary. Gross's stories crackle like the fire you would do well to read them by, just as we would expect from this one-time Newsweek writer and author of the prizewinning Minutemen and their World. Savoring them gives us unprecedented access to the birth of individualism, village capitalism, democracy, religious diversity, women's activism--in short, the modern world. --Woody Holton, author of Liberty is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution This book is a magnificent achievement, combining decades of research with a rare literary grace. While making it look easy, Robert Gross does what is nearly impossible, fusing deep social history with a penetrating analysis of the Transcendentalists and their writing. By grounding these celestial thinkers in a specific patch of earth, he has given a rare gift to his readers, and completed a process that began with The Minutemen and Their World in 1976. It strikes me as an achievement worthy of Emerson and Thoreau themselves. --Ted Widmer, author of Lincoln on the Verge In vivid prose and with keen insights, Robert Gross reveals the legacies of revolution and subsequent commercial transformation in a small town famous for its philosophers. Rich in historical irony, The Transcendentalists and Their World wryly explores how past and present defined intellectuals, who claimed to have freed themselves from both. --Alan Taylor, author of American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850 Robert Gross has given us something radically new: a deep social biography of a place and an idea. Concord, Massachusetts becomes nothing less than a living laboratory for understanding the profound transformation of American life from the common good to individualist self-discovery. The Transcendentalists and Their World is place-based social and intellectual history drawn from under the very feet of the men and women who wrote it. Emerson and Thoreau are here, but so are their friends and neighbors, famous, infamous, and obscure, each of them weaving the pattern of social life through their choices and decisions. The result is fascinating, revelatory--and unsettling, for this book quietly and persistently undermines whole structures of facile assumptions about who the Transcendentalists were, and how America got to be this way. An instant classic. Read it! and get ready to rethink everything you thought you knew. --Laura Dassow Walls, author of Henry David Thoreau: A Life Robert Gross brilliantly portrays the social, religious, and political forces in Concord that nourished what Emerson called 'the fields of my fathers.' By demonstrating how these passions and the men and women behind them shaped the early, productive lives of Emerson and Thoreau, Gross contextualizes as never before the environments in which the Transcendentalists and their literary neighbors like Hawthorne flourished, and how they shaped their interactions with the wider world. If Gross's The Minutemen and Their World followed the road to America's political independence, then this book, his magnum opus, describes and traces the ideas that helped initiate America's s literary and intellectual independence. --Joel Myerson, Carolina Distinguished Professor of American Literature Emeritus at the University of South Carolina, co-author of The Emerson Brothers, and editor of Transcendentalism: A Reader

Author Information

Robert A. Gross is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Books and Libraries in Thoreau's Concord and coeditor, with Mary Kelley, of An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840. A new edition of his influential The Minutemen and Their World will appear in tandem with The Transcendentalists and Their World.

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