American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work [Bargain Price] [Paperback]

Susan Cheever (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 18, 2007

The 1850s were heady times in Concord, Massachusetts: in a town where a woman's petticoat drying on an outdoor line was enough to elicit scandal, some of the greatest minds of our nation's history were gathering in three of its wooden houses to establish a major American literary movement. The Transcendentalists, as these thinkers came to be called, challenged the norms of American society with essays, novels, and treatises whose beautifully rendered prose and groundbreaking assertions still resonate with readers today. Though noted contemporary author Susan Cheever stands in awe of the monumental achievements of such writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Louisa May Alcott, her personal, evocative narrative removes these figures from their dusty pedestals and provides a lively account of their longings, jealousies, and indiscretions. Thus, Cheever reminds us that the passion of Concord's ambitious and temperamental resident geniuses was by no means confined to the page....

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This beguiling book is Cheever's exploration of the extraordinary cross-fertilization of creativity in Concord, Mass., during the mid-19th century, when Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and the Alcotts lived as neighbors there. If it won't offer much new information for serious students of American literature, it does provide a lively and insightful introduction to the personalities and achievements of the men and women who were seminal figures in America's literary renaissance, and who, Cheever theorizes, influenced the social activism of succeeding generations. In episodic chapters, Cheever describes their entwined relationships. Margaret Fuller was their brilliant, free-spirited muse and a model for Hester Prynne. Louisa May Alcott, was forced to support her family because her feckless father, Bronson, had no intention of doing so. Herman Melville briefly entered the enchanted circle through his friendship with Hawthorne. Cheever touches on their love affairs and intellectual platonic attractions, their high-minded idealism, their personal losses, their intermittent misunderstandings and jealousies, the years of penury suffered by all except Emerson and their full-fledged tragedies—such as Margaret Fuller's drowning. While Cheever sometimes indulges in high-flown speculation about their personal lives, she keenly analyzes the positive and negative ways they influenced one another's ideas and beliefs and the literature that came out of "this sudden outbreak of genius." 8 pages of photos. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

A request to write a new introduction to Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, writes novelist and memoirist Cheever, inspired her to explore the literary atmosphere of Alcott's childhood. A daughter of one of the free spirits intellectually supported and financially subsidized by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa intermittently lived in Concord, Massachusetts, where Cheever sets her intimate narratives. She explores the interpersonal relationships linking the prospectively famous writers Emerson drew in. In the transcendentalist florescence of the 1840s and 1850s, the aspirant writers tried out their ideas and idealism in conversation at Emerson's house, alongside Concord's roads, or afloat on its creeks. Moving among descriptions of such haunts, Cheever constructs a many-layered contemplation of this distinctive collection of American literary icons in their formative periods, and encompasses day-to-day events and the character of their attractions, as between a married Emerson and Margaret Fuller, whom Emerson lodged in his house. Emotionally warm and critically engaged, Cheever's history successfully evokes the incubation of Concord's literary glory. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (September 18, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743264622
• ASIN: B001D74I98
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (50 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #819,666 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I was born in New York City and have lived here on and off my entire life--in fact I went to nursery school a few blocks from where I write this. It took me a long time to admit I was a writer--I had a career as a teacher and I loved it. When I was married I couldn't get a teaching job so by an amazing stroke of luck I went to work for my local small town newspaper. After a long time as a newspaper and magazine journalist, I took off to write a novel when I was 35 and I haven't looked back.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

99 of 106 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Something is seriously amiss here, January 18, 2007

By 

Ann H. Harris - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work (Hardcover)

What a peculiar book! American Bloomsbury is easy to dislike for all
the reasons given in a number of the editorial and customer reviews:
the factual errors riddling the book beginning right on page 1 (little
Waldo Emerson was 5 when he died, not 9; Emily Dickinson and other
"neighbors" were not neighbors to the Concordians; the Emersons were
not married in 1838; and on and on and on), the jarring colloquialisms
(Emerson as sugar daddy, Thoreau as moocher, Hawthorne as rat), the
sweeping and totally unfounded assertions, and the sporadic
real-clunker sentences.

Such factors as these contribute to making a bad book, but what makes
this book peculiar is that the author shows herself capable, on a
number of pages, of producing compelling, factual, graceful prose, but
just as you are lulled into the story and willing to forgive and
forget the clunkers and errors just passed, she pulls you up short
with some sensationalistic or speculative doozy that utterly breaks
the spell. In the worst cases, these sojourns into fantasy make one
angry because they are so clearly untrue -- and purposeless except as
means to stoke the potboiler theme of the book: unconsummated lust,
cerebral adultery (and maybe more!), jealousy, seething
resentment.

The best example of this is her depiction of Hawthorne,
whose complex moral and intellectual flaws receive no attention at all
because Cheever chooses instead to focus one glaring spotlight on him
as "a rat with women." She quotes him out of context referring to his
wedding as an "execution," says by marrying Sophia he traded "passion
for stability," and has him panting after Margaret Fuller to the
extent that poor equally misrepresented and maligned Sophia is
depicted as almost "gloating" over the horrific death by drowning of
Margaret Fuller, her husband, and their baby. Cheever's depiction is a
colossal miscarriage of historical justice because in truth we admire
Hawthorne the man (as opposed to Hawthorne the author) perhaps most
for his gloriously happy and, yes, very passionate marriage and his
faithfulness and devotion year after year to Sophia. Cheever's version
is ridiculous, especially given that her bibliography is peppered with
biographies and other critical works that provide no foundation for
her story and in fact, if read, reveal just the opposite.

And yet, there are thoughtful pages on Thoreau and dozens of pages
that cleave to the truth and show a faithful grasp of events and
influences. There are lovely paragraphs describing nature. There are
passages that show sensitivity to the new thinking of that time, the
rebellious ferment,the originality and energy of this complicated
group of convention-busting freethinkers. But each time you begin to
float happily along, basking in the rich glow of a glorious American
renaissance, you strike an iceberg like the following paragraph:

"But the middle of the nineteenth century was a time when sexual
energy was pent up in this country, and all these people were
high-minded prudes, usually too wrapped up in Goethe to be thinking
about the carnal aspects of love. Even Walt Whitman had joined the
popular antimasturbation movement. None of them drank. Perhaps the
absence of actual physical intercourse, with its groping with the
endless skirts of the time, made the affairs of Emerson and Hawthorne
with Fuller even more intense than they might have been otherwise. The
only thing more powerful than lust is lust denied."

This paragraph's problems go beyond its numerous factual errors. But
even those factual errors are inexcusable. Emerson loved wine,
Nathaniel and Sophia loved their bed, and Nathaniel perhaps drank too
much. And that "popular antimasturbation movement?" Who knows. The
dozens of books I've read on this period have never mentioned it.

So, who actually wrote this book? A split personality? A committee? A
bunch of Bennington grad students with occasional oversight by the
author? A ghostwriter? A dabbler who spread her keyboard sessions too
far apart? It's almost hard to believe it to be the work of one
coherent person. But perhaps this is no harder to believe than that
the virtual army of "inestimable" and "brilliant" literary lights,
musicians, photographers, editors, agents, and educational
institutions acknowledged at the back of the book were unable to help
Cheever with the countless boo-boos, fibs, hyperbolic fits, and verbal
infelicities that fatally mar this book.

-----------------------------------------

Postscript: Does the truth matter anymore?

I've just read all of the currently posted reviews, which shoot from one end of the spectrum ("fabulous" & "a treasure") to the other ("shoddy" & "shameful"). The positive reviews appear to be written largely by people with little knowledge of the book's subject matter before reading, who were entertained by its content. The negative reviews appear to be written primarily by people knowledgeable about the American Renaissance and upset by the book's many errors, conjectures, and untruths, which, for them, precluded any entertainment value.

So I guess potential readers have to ask themselves: Do I place a higher value on entertainment or truth? Our current political situation and the best-seller status of fabricated works like James Frey's A Million Little Pieces would certainly indicate that as a culture we're not very concerned with the truth anymore.

My recommendation then boils down to this: if you are a person who loves and values truth, do not buy this book. If you are seeking entertainment and are indifferent as to the truthfulness of what you read, you may enjoy it.

114 of 125 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Shoddy Effort, February 2, 2007

By 

Stube's Auntie "Stube's Auntie" (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work (Hardcover)

I did not expect a great book on this subject by Susan Cheever, but I expected a fun and readable book. This is neither fun nor interesting nor particularly readable. Not only is _American Bloomsbury_ rife with factual errors -- an inexcusable breach considering the subject matter, upon which so much ink has been spilled that there is no excuse for shoddy research -- it is written in a bizarrely disjointed, juvenile tone and is the most poorly edited book I've seen in years. The interpretation of personalities and events are embarrassingly shallow, and the author can't decide if this is a personal reflection or a historical literary overview. Why, for instance, should we care about Cheever's revelation on p. 43 that "my ancestor Ezekiel Cheever was part of the [Salem witch] trials"? Ah, nepotism! Ms. Cheever must assume that her great literary name will interest readers of this book. Is there any other reason to skip into first person in the eleventh chapter of a book about the Transcendentalists?

I'm such a huge fan of the Transcendentalists that I'll read *anything* on them, but slogging through the rest of this stilted mess is going to take a LOT of commitment.

If you haven't purchased it yet, do yourself a favor and get the eminently superior _Emerson Among the Eccentrics_ by Carlos Baker. Read anything by David Robinson. Read _Daughter of Boston: The Extraordinary Diary of A Nineteenth-Century Woman Caroline Healey Dall_ by Helen Deese. Read Megan Marshall's marvelous contribution, _The Peabody Sisters_, read Phyllis Cole's absolutely brilliant _Mary Moody Emerson And the Origins of Transcendentalism_.

There is such a wealth of wonderful books out there on this subject, there's no reason to support this shoddy effort.

74 of 83 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A mild diversion unfortunately riddled with factual errors, January 4, 2007

By 

Corinne H. Smith (Athol, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work (Hardcover)

The premise seems interesting enough: use a light-hearted approach to detail the lives of the major Concord authors (Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau) and their sometimes steamy interpersonal relationships. To that end, Ms. Cheever does a decent job here. The nearly endless combinations indeed weave a transcendental web: Louisa-Henry, Louisa-Waldo, Henry-Lidian, Waldo-Margaret, Nathaniel-Margaret. And that's not even mentioning Ellen, Sophia or Count Ossoli. Thus does "American Bloomsbury" provide an overview of the lives of the originators of truly American literature.

And yet, nonfiction readers deserve accuracy. And the Concord writers deserve to be remembered honestly. This book is fraught with factual errors. And we're not talking about infinitesimal, esoteric, or subjective ones. We're not even talking about interpretations. These are mistakes that could have, nay, SHOULD have been corrected by consulting the very books listed in the bibliography on pages 211-214.

To Ms. Cheever's credit: she at least knew that the North Bridge wasn't standing in the mid-1800s. That's the most common mistake that writers make about this time period. But what about something as basic as the natural environment? Thoreau wouldn't have pointed out deer tracks or beaver dams to his students because both animals were rare in New England back then. He didn't see cardinals either, for they were "Dixie invaders" that didn't come north until decades later. OK, you might say. Those don't sound like big deals. We could overlook those assumptions. Fine.

Concord devotees will find here more than a dozen inaccuracies regarding Thoreau alone. Some of the most egregious ones appear on page 168, where the author states that Henry died in "the family house he helped build on Texas Street -- now named Thoreau Street." Well, that statement has multiple problems. First of all, the Thoreau family did indeed once inhabit a house built by Henry and his father. It was located on what was then Texas Street but is now Belknap Street in Concord. That house no longer exists. Secondly, there is a Thoreau Street, but the Thoreaus never lived along it. Third, Henry died in "The Yellow House," now referred to as the Thoreau-Alcott House, which sits on Main Street. He lived there for the last 12 years of his life and died in its living room in 1862. Members of the Alcott family lived in this same house after the Thoreaus were gone. Given that the author deliberately looked for path-crossings of the Concordians, it's a wonder she didn't mention that coincidence or even that house, for that matter. And the ultimate irony is that an old photograph of the Thoreau-Alcott house graces the cover of Cheever's book! But casual readers won't know that because the photo isn't identified anywhere on the jacket or otherwise in the text.

Though Cheever did a nice job with the end notes and bibliography, I'm shocked to see no credits given for the eight pages of photos. (I'll bet the suppliers of those photos are shocked as well.) That's certainly a research no-no. And even the brief photo captions are not without a glitch. The image of Thoreau is identified as having been taken "ten years after the publication of _Walden_." What a ghoulish trick that would have been, since the book was released in 1854, and he died in 1862. No, that daguerreotype dates from 1856. Perhaps we can give the author the benefit of the doubt. Maybe her original notes read "two years" instead of "ten years," and the printer got it wrong.

Ms. Cheever is obviously passionate about her subject matter, and her research isn't all bad. But when even basic facts are misrepresented, a shadow is cast over the entire work. Remember the movie "Runaway Bride"? The USA TODAY editor told columnist Ike Graham, "Journalism Lesson Number One: If you fabricate your facts, you get fired." I continue to be mystified by (a) how this inaccurate book got published, (b) why it continues to sell to members of an unsuspecting public, and (c) why descendants of Emerson and Hawthorne aren't lining up to file libel lawsuits. Readers of "American Bloomsbury," beware.

AFTERWORD: This review was written about the FIRST edition of this book. As of April 2007, I hear that a new edition is available which corrects the errors. I have not yet seen it to compare for myself. But readers and purchasers should be aware that multiple versions are out on the market.