The Concord Quartet: Alcott, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau ...

The town of Concord: a shrine to the life of thought:
This book is a nice overview of the lives of four key authors who spent most of their time in Concord, Massachusetts: Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. These men helped craft and define the course of true American literature through their essays, poetry, short stories, novels, nonfiction, conversations, lectures, and above all, journaling. Though no new material is presented here, Mr. Schreiner does a good job of tracing the four threads, merging them, and synthesizing basic facts with the subjects' own words. Along the way, the reader learns much about the town of Concord itself. Recommended reading for anyone who is looking for a casual yet fairly accurate introduction to the transcendentalists and to the Concord of the 1800s.

An illuminating portrait of four amazing men!:
This book is truly fantastic! Not only is the subject matter facinating, but the author weaves all the sublties together seamlessly. What might have been heavy subject matter is made by Schreiner into an exciting and surprisingly a fast read! This book is both informative and fun! I highly recommend it and it is going in all the Christmas stockings this year!

A Most Harmonious Quartet:
This wonderful book succeeds in making the great Concord writers and thinkers (Alcott, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau) living people without diminishing their indispensable contributions to the history of American literature and thought. The story of their relationships, quirks, disagreements, and, ultimately, love and support of each other goes a long way in identifying why this moment of time--the mid 19th century in Concord MA--led to such a flowering of philosophic and literary genius. Of particular worth in this volume is the redeeming vision it provides of Bronson Alcott, a figure often underrated and undervalued by modern critics. This is a fascinating story of a crucial moment in America's intellectual history.

Misinformation:
I was attracted to this book by its subject matter, but I was immediately put in an antagonistic position because of my own scholarly investigations. Briefly: To say that American transcendentalism began with the Concord friendship seriously distorts our literary (and intellectual) history. William Cullen Bryant (who is not even mentioned in the book's text) had been exposed to similar ideas by his father, Peter, who had encountered them with Harvard friends when he served in the Massachusetts legislature. The son's burst of poetry, published in 1821 after he addressed the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard on invitation from Harvard-connected North American Review editors, clearly shows the fruits of such ideas. (By the way, Emerson, who was graduating that year, was in the audience for that address.) See my William Cullen Bryant: An American Voice. It is similarly a severe wrenching of our literary history to continue to posit a Concord/Boston/New England genesis of our literature. New York City, after Philadelphia, had been the heart of American intellectual and literary life. See Brockden Brown and the Fortnightly at the turn of the century, the impact of Washington Irving and the unfortunately neglected James K. Paulding, and Bryant as well (who moved to NYC in 1825.