THE EMERSON CIRCLE

Vivid portrait of the writers who launched American literature.

In 1834, writes retired publisher Nichols, Ralph Waldo Emerson moved to Concord, Massachusetts, just at the time that he was “on his way to national celebrity for his lectures and essays.” He and his new neighbor and friend, Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May, firmly rejected the divinity of Christ, a stance that might have gotten them drawn and quartered in Puritan New England but had plenty of sympathizers in the swelter of “abolitionists, freethinkers, feminists, vegetarians, animal-rights activists, teetotalers, and literary lights” who dominated the discourse. Entering the scene were the painfully shy Nathaniel Hawthorne, the forthright Herman Melville, and the spirited Henry David Thoreau (whom Hawthorne described as “ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic, although courteous manners”). Most of the writers shared a genteel poverty, Thoreau being so desperate that he briefly took a job in New York City before deciding that he couldn’t stand urban life and retreated to build his famous cabin at Walden Pond—on property owned by Emerson, as it happens, the best off financially of the lot, who allowed the construction even though he had tired of “Thoreau’s obstreperousness.” For his part, writes Nichols in an elegant turn of phrase, “Thoreau transcended Transcendentalism,” a pioneer of the “American Renaissance” of the 1850s, which saw the publication of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick, and of course Thoreau’s Walden. Each book revolutionized literature—though, as Hawthorne noted with green envy, Louisa May Alcott outsold them all with Little Women. Nichols is a thoughtful reader of these texts, and he turns up interesting details that are not widely known, from Emerson’s certainty that “the white ‘race’ was destined to dominate the earth” to Thoreau’s making his cabin available as a stop on the Underground Railroad.

An invigorating work of social and literary history, its learning lightly worn.