Spark noun. a trace or hint | inspiration or catalyst | an ignited or fiery particle, something that sets off a sudden force | anything that serves to animate, kindle, or excite

American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work
By Susan Cheever
Simon & Schuster, 2007 (Paperback)
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....

The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller's Life and Writings
By Bell Gale Chevigny
Northeastern University Press, 1993 (Paperback) Alternate Formats
This new edition of this classic and influential book features recently recovered writings about Fuller by her contemporaries and additional selections from Fuller's writings, including previously unpublished excerpts from her journals.

The Blithedale Romance
By Nathaniel Hawthorne
Penguin Classics, 1983
Renowned 19th-century author Nathaniel Hawthorne writes fully in his own time, not haunting his characters with the American past as in his more famous works THE HOUSE OF SEVEN GABLES and THE SCARLET LETTER. Published in 1852, THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE remains a captivating work about politics, love, the supernatural, and idealism, written with Hawthorne's sharp wit and deep intelligence.

The Scarlet Letter
By Nathaniel Hawthorne
Penguin Classics, 2002
Set in the harsh Puritan community of seventeenth-century Massachusetts, this tale of an adulterous entanglement resulting in an illegitimate birth engendered the first true heroine of American fiction.
Introduction by Nina Baym
Notes by Thomas E. Connolly

Walden and Other Writings
By Henry David Thoreau
Modern Library, 2000
With their call for "simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!", for self-honesty, and for harmony with nature, the writings of Henry David Thoreau are perhaps the most influential philosophical works in all American literature. The selections in this volume represent Thoreau at his best. Included in their entirety are Walden, his indisputable masterpiece, and his two great arguments for nonconformity, Civil Disobedience and Life Without Principle. A lifetime of brilliant observation of nature--and of himself--is recorded in selections from A Week On The Concord And Merrimack Rivers, Cape Cod, The Maine Woods and The Journal.

Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women
By Harriet Reisen
Henry Holt and Co., 2009
Louisa May Alcott portrays a writer as worthy of interest in her own right as her most famous character, Jo March, and addresses all aspects of Alcott's life: the effect of her father's self-indulgent utopian schemes; her family's chronic economic difficulties and frequent uprootings; her experience as a nurse in the Civil War; the loss of her health and frequent recourse to opiates in search of relief from migraines, insomnia, and symptomatic pain. Stories and details culled from Alcott's journals; her equally rich letters to family, friends, publishers, and admiring readers; and the correspondence, journals, and recollections of her family, friends, and famous contemporaries provide the basis for this lively account of the author's classic rags-to-riches tale. This revelatory portrait will present the popular author as she was and as she has never been seen before.

Concord Quartet: Alcott, Emerson, Hawthorne,Thoreau, and the Friendship That Freed the American Mind
By Samuel Agnew Schreiner
John Wiley & Sons Inc, 2006
From the start of transcendentalism and America's intellectual renaissance in the 1830s, to the Civil War and beyond, the story of four extraordinary friends whose lives shaped a nation.

The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings
by Lawrence Buell
Modern Library Classics from Random House, 2006
Transcendentalism was the first major intellectual movement in U.S. history, championing the inherent divinity of each individual, as well as the value of collective social action. In the mid-nineteenth century, the movement took off, changing how Americans thought about religion, literature, the natural world, class distinctions, the role of women, and the existence of slavery. Edited by the eminent scholar Lawrence Buell, this comprehensive anthology contains the essential writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and their fellow visionaries. There are also reflections on the movement by Charles Dickens, Henry James, Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. This remarkable volume introduces the radical innovations of a brilliant group of thinkers whose impact on religious thought, social reform, philosophy, and literature continues to reverberate in the twenty-first century.

Margaret Fuller: A Brief Biography with Documents
By Eve Kornfeld
Bedford/St. Martin's, 1996
As a well-known editor and journalist, Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) questioned the conventional boundaries that circumscribed American society in the first half of the nineteenth century. This collection of her letters, essays, poems, and journalism reveals a woman who developed a feminist and humanist vision that transcended class, racial, national, and gender borders.

American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation.
By Caleb Crain
Yale University Press, 2001
"A friend in history", Henry David Thoreau once wrote, "looks like some premature soul". And in the history of friendship in early America, Caleb Crain sees the soul of the nation's literature.
In a sensitive analysis that weaves together literary criticism and historical narrative, Crain describes the strong friendships between men that supported and inspired some of America's greatest writing -- the Gothic novels of Charles Brockden Brown, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the novels of Herman Melville. He traces the genealogy of these friendships through a series of stories. A dapper English spy inspires a Quaker boy to run away from home. Three Philadelphia gentlemen conduct a romance through diaries and letters in the 1780s. Flighty teenager Charles Brockden Brown metamorphoses into a horror novelist by treating his friends as his literary guinea pigs. Emerson exchanges glances with a Harvard classmate but sacrifices his crush on the altar of literature -- a decision Margaret Fuller invites him to reconsider two decades later. Throughout this engaging book, Crain demonstrates the many ways in which the struggle to commit feelings to paper informed the shape and texture of American literature.

Emerson: The Mind on Fire
By Robert D. Richardson
University of California Press, 1996
Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most important figures in the history of American thought, religion, and literature. The vitality of his writings and the unsettling power of his example continue to influence us more than a hundred years after his death. Now Robert D. Richardson Jr. brings to life an Emerson very different from the old stereotype of the passionless Sage of Concord. Drawing on a vast amount of new material, including correspondence among the Emerson brothers, Richardson gives us a rewarding intellectual biography that is also a portrait of the whole man.

The Portable Margaret Fuller
By Margaret Fuller and Mary Kelley
An anthology of the writings of Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), American editor, essayist, poet, teacher and author. An associate of Emerson, Thoreau and William Henry Channing at the Brook Farm Community in Massachusetts, Fuller edited the transcendentalist journal "The Dial", and became the first woman journalist for the "New York Tribune". This book includes the texts "Summer on the Lakes" and "Women in the Nineteenth Century" in their entirety, a selection of criticisms, her despatches from Italy for Horace Greeley during the Italian Revolution, and selected correspondence. Mary Kelley has edited and prefaced the collection with a critical introduction, and provided chronology and notes.

"My Heart is a Large Kingdom": Selected Letters of Margaret Fuller
By Robert N. Hudspeth, Margaret Fuller
This single-volume selection of the letters of Margaret Fuller affords a unique opportunity for renewed acquaintance with a great American thinker of the Transcendentalist circle. The letters represent Fuller at all stages of her life and career, and show her engaged as literary critic, as translator and as champion of German literature and thought, as teacher, as travel writer, as literary editor, as journalist, as feminist, as revolutionary, as wife and mother. "My Heart Is a Large Kingdom", unlike previous collections, includes only letters transcribed from Fuller's manuscripts and does not reproduce correspondence known only from printed sources and copies in hands other than Fuller's.

Among the recipients of the letters in this generous selection are such literary and cultural figures as Bronson Alcott, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Giuseppe Mazzini, Giovanni Angelo Ossoli (Fuller's husband), George Ripley, and Henry David Thoreau. Taken together, the letters serve as a chronicle of Fuller's lifetime and provide glimpses into her thoughts and feelings during the years of the "Conversations", Dial, and the revolution in Rome.

Additional Links

The Margaret Fuller Bicentennial