eBook downloads, eBook resources & eBook authors
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography Louisa May Alcott is known universally. Yet during Louisa's youth, the famous Alcott was her father, Bronson—an eminent teacher and a friend of Emerson and Thoreau. He desired perfection, for the world and from his family. Louisa challenged him with her mercurial moods and yearnings for money and fame. The other prize she deeply coveted—her father's understanding—seemed hardest to win. This story of Bronson and Louisa's tense yet loving relationship adds dimensions to Louisa's life, her work, and the relationships of fathers and daughters.
More than any previous study of Alcott, this biography examines his ideas and their historical significance critically and shows how Alcott epitomized American thought in the nineteenth century.
This is a definitive account of Fruitlands, one of history's most unsuccessful, but most significant, utopian experiments. It was established in Massachusetts in 1843 by Bronson Alcott (whose ten year old daughter Louisa May, future author of Little Women, was among the members) and an Englishman called Charles Lane, under the watchful gaze of Emerson, Thoreau, and other New England intellectuals. Alcott and Lane developed their own version of the doctrine known as Transcendentalism, hoping to transform society and redeem the environment through a strict regime of veganism and celibacy. But physical suffering and emotional conflict, particularly between Lane and Alcott's wife, Abigail, made the community unsustainable. Drawing on the letters and diaries of those involved, the author explores the relationship between the complex philosophical beliefs held by Alcott, Lane, and their fellow idealists and their day to day lives. The result is a vivid and often very funny narrative of their travails, demonstrating the dilemmas and conflicts inherent to any utopian experiment and shedding light on a fascinating period of American history.
A great niece and cousin of Louisa May Alcott draws on newly uncovered family papers to present a revisionist portrait of Louisa's relationship with her mother, discussing how Abigail May served as the intellectual and emotional center of Louisa's life.
Every now and then the past yields up one of its lost treasures. This book is just such a gem. Bronson Alcott, friend and sometimes mentor to Emerson and Thoreau in Concord, was also a visionary educator who believed that the psyche of a child already carries within it the imprint of spirit and wisdom. At his school in Boston in the 1830s, he held this extraordinary series of conversations on such themes as spirit, consciousness, conscience, love, humility, the Holy Ghost, and the knower.
Notes of Conversations, 1848-1875 is a volume of transcripts of conversations conducted by the nineteenth-century American philosopher and educator A. Bronson Alcott at various locations in New England and the Midwest. The transcripts have been created from unpublished manuscripts in the Alcott collection at Harvard University and Concord Free Library, as well as published contemporary articles in The Radical, New York Daily Tribune, and The Chicago Tribune. Gathered in this volume, Alcott's transcripts vividly reflect American intellectual concerns from the years preceding the Civil War through the beginning of the Gilded Age.
