Bancroft Prize-winning historian Gross returns to Concord, Mass., this time to explore the rise of transcendentalist thought that arose there among residents Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Alcotts and their community of friends and fellow thinkers.
... easily the most comprehensive work ever written about the town’s social history during the transcendentalist era ... Mr. Gross’s historiography is patient, thorough, cumulative ... One of the most fascinating chapters in Mr. Gross’s account examines a number of young men and women of the village who fell under the spell of Emerson’s thought ... Mr. Gross’s richly detailed account shows us how such a surprising conjunction of place and thought could occur.
Gross ably depicts how Concord shaped these two writers, and how they also departed from town norms. Yet his narrative of town life too often becomes an end in itself and overwhelms any relation to the transcendentalists. This is especially true with regard to politics ... So why all the detail from the amity-filled Era of Good Feelings to the pitched battles between Masons and Anti-Masons, and the decades of clashes in between? More than 600 pages of text, conveyed in very small type, this tome requires the most patient and indulgent of readers. Trimming down the excess surely would have sharpened a focus on the relationship of Concord to its favorite sons ... Still, it’s hard not to respect this labor of a lifetime. His scholarship, based on research in many other libraries as well, is impeccable. In balance...an essential work on these towering figures of American literature.
The phrase 'lost in the weeds' is only an insult when it assumes one doesn’t want to be there. Gross appears to be perfectly content in them. When he and the reader reach a clearing in those weeds, he’s good at saying why they matter (in the case of pencils and other commerce, it’s the world being reshaped by capitalism and the Industrial Revolution), but those clearings can be achingly far apart ... The arrival and influence of the Transcendentalists lacks such a clear endgame—which is fine, but it seems perverse that Emerson and Thoreau rarely appear in the first, long half of a book with this title ... You sometimes sense that Gross’s Concord is somehow more detailed than the place itself was. This is, in a purely industrious way, inarguably impressive. It is also, for long stretches, not easy to read. The book becomes more inviting when Gross finally plants Emerson and Thoreau in his extensively tilled soil ... One learns a great deal in this book—about religious history, the railroad’s influence on smaller-town living, changing theories of education, tensions between individualism and collectivism that still bedevil the country today. But despite the benefits of Gross’s low-flying genre, which has spawned shelves of excellent books, it’s hard not to wish he had spent just a bit more time in this one at 30,000 feet.
