Transcendentalism

A man settles for two years in a cabin by a Massachusetts pond to find out how many things one can do without: Walden turns the experiment into a book. Around Concord, in the 1830s and 1840s, Emerson and his friends held that truth lies in nature and in individual conscience rather than in scripture and institutions. Margaret Fuller extended the argument to the rights of women, Whitman gave it the breath of free verse. That tiny circle founded an American way of thinking about nature and disobedience.

works 5

• EssayNatureRalph Waldo Emerson · 1836An age that looks at the universe through the eyes of the fathers; these pages offer it an original relation to the universe, sought alone, in a field.LiteraturePublic domain
• EssayWoman in the Nineteenth CenturyMargaret Fuller · 1845The essay demands that no limit be fixed in advance on what women can do.Literature
• NarrativeWaldenHenry David Thoreau · 1854The railway now runs alongside the pond. This text sets against the age a calculation: what it takes to live, and what the rest costs in life.LiteraturePublic domain
• PoetryLeaves of GrassWalt Whitman · 1855This collection arrives without metre or rhyme and without an author's name, preceded by the portrait of a man in shirtsleeves who speaks of his flesh and that of others.LiteraturePublic domain
• EssayConcord DaysAmos Bronson Alcott · 1872The book is by a member of the Concord transcendentalist circle, a friend of Emerson and Thoreau.Literature