Reviews in American History

“There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence. It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions, and social structure are changing in consequence. It promises a higher reason, a more human community, and a new and liberated individual. Its ultimate creation will be a new and enduring wholeness and beauty—a renewed relationship of man to himself, to other men, to society, to nature, and to the land. . . . At the heart of everything is what we shall call a change of consciousness. This means a ‘new head’—a new way of living—a new man.”¹

Until the giveaway phrase “a new head,” these words might have been written by virtually any of the Transcendentalists circa 1840 or by Emerson in “Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England,” his retrospect of time and place.² In fact, they are from Charles A. Reich’s 1970 The Greening of America, a book of neo-Transcendentalist prophecy and a reminder that the nearest analog to the feeling of imminent cultural revolution among the disaffected young of Unitarian New England between 1836 and 1846 was the feeling of quasi-millennial expectancy among the disaffected young across America in the later 1960s and early 1970s.

For reasons that have nothing perceptibly to do with the zeitgeist of early-twenty-first-century America, publishers have lately come to view Transcendentalism as a marketable commodity. Three new anthologies have appeared in recent years—Joel Myerson’s Transcendentalism: A Reader (2000), Richard G. Geldard’s The Essential Transcendentalists (2005), and Lawrence Buell’s The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings (2006)—along with a new edition of George Hochfield’s excellent Selected Writings of the American Transcendentalists (1966; 2004). John Matteson’s Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father (2007) won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for biography. Popularizers have also discovered the Concord group. Susan Cheever deals [End Page 365] with Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Louisa May Alcott in her gossipy, inept American Bloomsbury (2006), Samuel A Schreiner, Jr. with Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Bronson Alcott in his well-informed The Concord Quartet (2006), and Philip McFarland with Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Elizabeth Peabody, among others, in Hawthorne in Concord (2004).

Philip F. Gura’s American Transcendentalism: A History is the work of an established scholar of American literature and is a notable contribution to the field, though rarely a groundbreaking or markedly revisionary one. Gura’s purpose is synthetic. His book is intended as the chronicle of a movement, not a work of acute analysis, psychological probing, or broad cultural contextualization, and within its chosen terms it by and large succeeds for an implied audience of intelligent readers who are probably academics but are not deeply versed in the subject. Gura has a fine sense of moment and milieu, and among the most felicitous passages in his book are those that sketch places such as Elizabeth Peabody’s West Street bookstore-cum-Transcendental-salon, events such as the auctioning of Joseph Stevens Buckminster’s library in 1812, and less familiar personages such as minister John Weiss and movement historian Octavius Brooks Frothingham. On the more prominent actors in the drama (George Ripley, Orestes Brownson, and Theodore Parker), Gura is knowledgeable, lucid, and reliable, though others like William R. Hutchison in The Transcendentalist Ministers (1959) have ably worked the field before him (one of the peculiarities of American Transcendentalism is that Gura rarely cites scholarly predecessors, even in endnotes). On the major literary figures (Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller), Gura is less satisfying; the same allotted space might have produced a great deal more of substance.

Gura’s preface sounds the characteristic Transcendentalist note of living on the threshold of epochal change. As the example of Reich suggests, nothing seems quainter...