He set out to make his utopian dream come true-Bronson Alcott, his wife and four daughters, and an odd assortment of friends who knew more about philosophy than they did about farming. Would their experience at Fruitlands last through the hard New England winter? Transcendentalist commune is for readers of all ages who love Alcott, history, or just a good story told with humor and sensitivity.
This is a definitive account of Fruitlands, one of history's most unsuccessful, but most significant, utopian experiments. It was established in Massachusetts in 1843 by Bronson Alcott (whose ten year old daughter Louisa May, future author of Little Women, was among the members) and an Englishman called Charles Lane, under the watchful gaze of Emerson, Thoreau, and other New England intellectuals. Alcott and Lane developed their own version of the doctrine known as Transcendentalism, hoping to transform society and redeem the environment through a strict regime of veganism and celibacy. But physical suffering and emotional conflict, particularly between Lane and Alcott's wife, Abigail, made the community unsustainable. Drawing on the letters and diaries of those involved, the author explores the relationship between the complex philosophical beliefs held by Alcott, Lane, and their fellow idealists and their day to day lives. The result is a vivid and often very funny narrative of their travails, demonstrating the dilemmas and conflicts inherent to any utopian experiment and shedding light on a fascinating period of American history.
The discovery in recent years of Louisa May Alcott's pseudonymous sensation stories has made readers and scholars increasingly aware of her accomplishments beyond her most famous novel, Little Women, one of the great international best-sellers of all time. This anthology brings together for the first time a variety of Louisa May Alcott's journalistic, satiric, feminist, and sensation texts. Elaine Showalter has provided an excellent introduction and notes to the collection.
A portrait of five Concord, Massachusetts, writers whose works were at the center of mid-nineteenth-century American thought and literature evaluates their interconnected relationships, influence on each other's works, and complex beliefs.
Together along with generous selections from Fuller's Dial essays, New York essays, Italian dispatches, and unpublished journals. Special features are the complete text of Fuller's famous "Autobiographical Romance" (never before reprinted in its entirety) and nineteen of her poems, edited from her manuscripts. All of Fuller's major texts are completely annotated, with special attention to her literary and historical sources, as well as her knowledge of American Indian.
THIS 38 PAGE ARTICLE WAS EXTRACTED FROM THE BOOK: Bronson Alcott's Fruitlands With Transcendental Wild Oats, by Louisa May Alcott. To purchase the entire book, please order ISBN 0766180042.
With her older sister planning a wedding and her younger sister preparing to launch a career on the stage, Lulu can't help but feel like the failure of the Atwater family. Lulu loves her sisters dearly and wants nothing but the best for them, but she finds herself stuck in a rut. When her mother sends her to look for some old family recipes in the attic, she stumbles across a collection of letters written by her great-great-grandmother Josephine March. Jo writes in detail about every aspect of her life: her older sister Meg's new home and family; her younger sister Amy's many admirers; the family's shared grief over losing Beth; and her own feelings towards a handsome young German. As Lulu delves deeper into the lives of the March sisters, she finds solace and guidance, but can her great-great-grandmother help Lulu find a place in a world so different from the one Jo knew?--From publisher description.
Choice collection of 13 stories includes "Life in the Iron Mills" by Rebecca Harding Davis, Zora Neale Hurston's "Sweat," plus superb fiction by Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, many others.
Recounts the story behind the defeat, of the British forces under Banastre Tarleton by Daniel Morgan's rebels, that helped turn the tide of the Revolutionary War in the South. The battlefield, a pasture in North Carolina, is now part of the National Park System. Includes brief notes about related battlegrounds and a list of books for further reading.
