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American Bloomsbury
Susan Cheever
#UB8732
Paperback, 223 pages; 2007 (2006)
$15.00
 Members' Price: $12.75
They all loved Concord. Hawthorne called it Eden. Emerson wrote that he spent his best days there. Her Concord days were "the happiest of my life," Louisa May Alcott said. "Concord," wrote Henry James, is "the biggest little place in America."
The characters of Susan Cheever's delightful group portrait include Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. In American Bloomsbury, Cheever describes Concord, Massachusetts, as the epicenter of nineteenth-century American literature and philosophy, just as Bloomsbury was to England in the early decades of the twentieth century. The denizens of Bloomsbury were notorious for their complicated interpersonal relationships. Similarly, these icons of transcendentalism that we often view as staid and stodgy also interacted with intense likes and dislikes. It's intriguing to observe how their lives differed from what we might have gleaned of them from their work. Don't be put off thinking this book is stodgy or staid, either. Cheever's lively biographical anthology is as entertaining as it is enlightening.
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