Customer Reviews

The Concord Quartet: Alcott, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau and the Friendship That Freed the American Mind

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a nice overview of the lives of four key authors who spent most of their time in Concord, Massachusetts: Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. These men helped craft and define the course of true American literature through their essays, poetry, short stories, novels, nonfiction, conversations, lectures, and above all, journaling. Though no new material is presented here, Mr. Schreiner does a good job of tracing the four threads, merging them, and synthesizing basic facts with the subjects' own words. Along the way, the reader learns much about the town of Concord itself. Recommended reading for anyone who is looking for a casual yet fairly accurate introduction to the transcendentalists and to the Concord of the 1800s.

This wonderful book succeeds in making the great Concord writers and thinkers (Alcott, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau) living people without diminishing their indispensable contributions to the history of American literature and thought. The story of their relationships, quirks, disagreements, and, ultimately, love and support of each other goes a long way in identifying why this moment of time--the mid 19th century in Concord MA--led to such a flowering of philosophic and literary genius. Of particular worth in this volume is the redeeming vision it provides of Bronson Alcott, a figure often underrated and undervalued by modern critics. This is a fascinating story of a crucial moment in America's intellectual history.

This book is truly fantastic! Not only is the subject matter facinating, but the author weaves all the sublties together seamlessly. What might have been heavy subject matter is made by Schreiner into an exciting and surprisingly a fast read! This book is both informative and fun! I highly recommend it and it is going in all the Christmas stockings this year!

Using a condensed biographical narrative, in The Concord Quartet Schreiner demonstrates his gift for extracting from large amounts of text that which is most sublime in material overbrimming with eloquence and import. Schreiner traces the lives and relationships of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and educator Amos Bronson Alcott from early manhood through love liaisons and marriages, careers and politics, children and friendships, and finally to their deaths and the story's logical end, largely in the words of the men themselves. Schreiner states in his prologue that coincidence brought these men together in Concord as neighbors and friends "who shared a conviction that the soul had 'inherent power to grasp the truth' and that the truth would make men free of old constraints of thought and behavior." If Schreiner at times appears to take liberties of interpretation, he does so deferentially, and the proportional text of the chief subjects' quoted material, accurately transcribed, is sufficient to allow the reader to draw his or her own surmises. Since Schreiner uses brief excerpts taken from many volumns of material, his book must be understood from the beginning to be incomplete by design. The Concord Quartet might be viewed as an introduction calculated to encourage further inquiry. After a hesitating beginning, the author soon finds his rhythm and the reader's persistence is rewarded with an engaging tale that also features cameo appearances by other nation-shapers, including writer and feminist Margaret Fuller, poet Walt Whitman, and naturalist John Muir. Schreiner judiciously designs the story so that highlighted on nearly every page are direct quotations from the principals and numerous auxiliary sources. Schreiner in his role of storyteller skillfully joins these excerpts into a logical sequence of events in his own words. With this work Schreiner accomplishes an important re-telling of a vital link in the history of human thought as disseminated primarily in the lectures and publications of Emerson and Thoreau, and which inroduced to Americans a doctrine of reason and an optimism in religious and spiritual thought to counter prevalent Calvinistic doctrine. In the arena of popular literature, the success of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter helped bring about an acceptance of previously taboo subjects for writers and a new openness in thinking among both women and men. Central to the story is the involvement of the Quartet in the political turmoil of the early and middle nineteenth century in the decades leading up to the American Civil War. This was the era of "Manifest Destiny," a term coined by a Washington editor, John O'Sullivan. The concept was one of many justifications assimilated by Americans at a time of unchecked expansionism and legal slave-holding. Conspicuous in Schreiner's work is the racial and cultural segregation inherent in the subject matter. He documents the involvement of Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott in their efforts to abolish slavery and class systems in America, and also documents Hawthorne's public support of his life-long friend, pro-slavery President Franklin Pierce. For relative newcomers to this segment of American history and literature, or for persons long absent from the topic, Schreiner in The Concord Quartet has effected a noteworthy medium for transmitting the continuing relevance of an important cultural upheaval in which these writer-thinkers were major figures. He also has achieved an intermediate state between an academic subject and an easily readable story which acknowledges and validates a lay readership capable of enjoying biographies of notable scholars. The Concord Quartet's compass, vocabulary, and treatment of subject matter make is appropriate for school libraries and as supplemental reading in high school English and American History classes. Its accessible novella style will engage young readers and provide a useful forum for discussion. It is a competent overview of nineteenth century national political issues and of the evolution of philosophical and religious thought in America that came to be called Transcendentalism. In the present age, with the United States again divided by war, and an ethos of disillusionment widely in vogue, this book is a timely publication which recalls a newer America equally fragile, divided, and disillusioned.

A good, very readable narrative about Bronson Alcott, Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne - with emphasis in that order. Hawthorne seemed to weave in and out more as an ancillary figure than a main character but it was nice to read something that brought Alcott to the forefront. The book stays true to its title, focusing almost exclusively on their time in the town of Concord. Because of that, the book is not the best for biography of these figures. Another reviewer used the word "light" and I'd echo that. I'd also say "engaging," but avoid the term "in-depth."

Okay, I have three complaints about the book. It's written by a fiction writer and a lot of important facts were omitted, presumably to keep the narrative flow intact. What disturbs that flow worse than dates, right? Because of that, half the time I had no idea what decade I was in (which, if you're reading for history, is frustrating). It was made worse because my edition of the book has no footnotes (which always leaves me skeptical about quotes). Speaking of quotes, most were just too long. I understand the author's intent to keep the story told in their own words but there's a reason I didn't read Emerson's essays and chose this book instead. Some extended quotes go on for three or four pages (again, without attribution in some cases). Some of the quotes were relevant, but portions of it weren't. A good editor should have cut them down and more focused.

Overall, however, this is a good book, and a good read to give background on these important figures.

I was attracted to this book by its subject matter, but I was immediately put in an antagonistic position because of my own scholarly investigations.

Briefly: To say that American transcendentalism began with the Concord friendship seriously distorts our literary (and intellectual) history. William Cullen Bryant (who is not even mentioned in the book's text) had been exposed to similar ideas by his father, Peter, who had encountered them with Harvard friends when he served in the Massachusetts legislature. The son's burst of poetry, published in 1821 after he addressed the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard on invitation from Harvard-connected North American Review editors, clearly shows the fruits of such ideas. (By the way, Emerson, who was graduating that year, was in the audience for that address.) See my William Cullen Bryant: An American Voice.

It is similarly a severe wrenching of our literary history to continue to posit a Concord/Boston/New England genesis of our literature. New York City, after Philadelphia, had been the heart of American intellectual and literary life. See Brockden Brown and the Fortnightly at the turn of the century, the impact of Washington Irving and the unfortunately neglected James K. Paulding, and Bryant as well (who moved to NYC in 1825.