Be Careful: Writers at Work

I'm reading Susan Cheever's book on the Transcendentalists, called "American Bloomsbury." It's about midcentury Concord, Massachusetts and the group of writers who orbited around Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Besides the somewhat flip tone of the book [and its many factual errors], it is fascinating to read about this group of perpetually unemployed egotistical losers Thoreau, Alcott, Emerson, Hawthorne, Fuller and assorted hangers-on. Yes, they hated materialism! Because they had no money! They had no marketable skills and no taste for competition. So they whined their days away extolling the virtue of ... whining one's days away. Seem a mite convenient?

Whilst all around them, the industrial revolution, mass immigration from Europe and Asia, inevitable social progress and reform took seed in pre-Civil War America. While they were busy doin' nothin'. The original hippies.

And, in some fashion, it was all made possible - Bronson Alcott's many failed Utopian schools, Thoreau's Walden retreat, Hawthorne being saved from poverty so that he could meet Margaret Fuller and then write "Scarlet Letter" based on her - by the fact that Emerson sued his first wife's family so that he could gain her share of the inheritance, as the first Mrs. Emerson died about one year after their marriage. So, if you read "Walden" and enjoy it, remember to thank a Plaintiff's lawyer.

Peace.