The Transcendentalists and Their World

By: Robert A. Gross

Narrated by: Paul Brion

The Transcendentalists and Their World offers a fresh view of the thinkers whose outsized impact on philosophy and literature would spread from tiny Concord to all corners of the earth. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Alcotts called this New England town home, and Thoreau drew on its life extensively in his classic Walden. But Concord from the 1820s through the 1840s was no pastoral place fit for poets and philosophers.

The Transcendentalists lived through a transformative epoch of American life. Concord was a community in ferment, whose small, ordered society was unsettled through the expansive forces of capitalism and democracy. These changes challenged a world of inherited institutions and involuntary associations with a new premium on autonomy and choice.

The Transcendentalists and Their World is both an intimate journey into the life of a community and a searching cultural study of major American writers as they plumbed the depths of the universe for spiritual truths and surveyed the rapidly changing contours of their own neighborhoods. It shows us familiar figures in American literature alongside their neighbors at every level of the social order, and it reveals how this common life in Concord entered powerfully into their works.

©2021 Robert A. Gross (P)2022 Tantor

Okay, but …

Not the best narrator. He speaks in monotone with no variation, and needs to at least get the pronunciation of “Concord” right.

Pretty good and worth both the cost and the time, but it ended abruptly.

The initial chapters were so stuffed with detail about the forebears of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, that I came to anticipate a much more detailed treatment of these principals. But then the book just…stopped. Also I think a book on Transcendentalism is not really complete without mention of Walt Whitman. I realize that all books have to start and stop somewhere. But while this book started out with great vigor, I guess the author ran out of energy before he exhausted his subject.

Good but…

This is a thorough examination of the cultural and intellectual climate of the Transcendentalists of the early/ mid Nineteenth Century… that said, I do wish there were more analysis behind more of Emerson’s writing, and more examination of the relationship between the Transcendentalists (there was some, but not enough IMO). If you’re looking for a broad cultural review of early mid 19th Century New England, then this book is for you.

Comprehensive

Nice balance of specific to Concord info as well as more general info about the overall American scene

It’s not CON-chord!!

Super irritating that the narrator didn’t bother to look up the pronunciation before saying CON-chord incorrectly in at least every other sentence….it’s pronounced “conquered”. Really hard to listen this awkward narrator.