Transcendentalist Reading

In the middle of the first on this list. Before that, I finished the other two.

📚 What I've Been Reading

Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography
by David S. Reynolds

The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography
by John Matteson

Emerson: The Mind on Fire
by Robert D. Richardson

🐿️ Chasing Squirrels

All three have set me chasing many squirrels. It's best to list the topics:

• The Farm
• The New York fire around the middle of the 1830s
• A group called the Loafers
• Typesetting and printing in the early 1800s
• The transcendentalist movement — then and now

🤖 A Research Companion

AI is incredibly useful when one sets out chasing squirrels. What follows are some of the queries prompted by what I have been listening to:

Controversy surrounding James Gordon Bennett and Walt Whitman
Antagonism between Walt Whitman and Mike Walsh
Margaret Fuller published review after hearing Chopin play
Amos Bronson Alcott quote concerning God and man
Frederic Henry Hedge works read Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are a few notebooks I started at NotebookLM:

• Navigating the Post-Work Society
• Transcendentalism

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✒️ Margaret Fuller in Europe

Margaret Fuller lived for many years in Europe, sending letters back to the New York Tribune with her assessment of things that caught her fancy. She is considered the first female foreign correspondent. Her life there must have been dreary indeed. Working for little pay, she counted on help from friends and colleagues.

She also met a man; they had relations and conceived a child. That situation had to be kept a secret. Through illness and political unrest she survived it all, only to have her and her family's lives snuffed out attempting to move to the US. An inexperienced crew on the boat that gave them passage drove it onto a sand bar in a storm, and they were swept away in the confusion.

🎭 Notes on Whitman & Emerson

Walt Whitman was against slavery, but early on he was also anti-abolition. He was probably gay; the author of the book points out many passages in his writing that he supposes were inspired by alleged attraction toward the opposite sex.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was probably in love with Margearet Fuller, but there's no direct evidence it was pursued by either. They most probably were not intimate.

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Some of the squirrels I will continue to chase.
Others will be let loose when I move on to other books.

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✦ A note: Claude (an AI assistant by Anthropic) helped with this post by correcting typos and punctuation and by adding visual formatting. All ideas and underlying prose are the author's own.