Summary Of John Matteson S Eden S Outcasts

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 Bronson Alcott’s life was shaped by three significant events that occurred within a short period of time in 1828: he paid his first visit to the city of Boston, he first heard the preaching of a young Unitarian minister named Ralph Waldo Emerson, and he proposed marriage to a fascinating woman named Abigail May. #2 Bronson’s school days were interrupted by a total solar eclipse in 1806. He and a group of boys gathered stones to throw at the phenomenon. He stepped awkwardly, dislocating his shoulder blade. More than sixty years later, he recalled this accident as a prophecy of his life. #3 Bronson Alcott grew up on Spindle Hill, and he loved it. It was there that he learned about the world and his parents’ farm, which he found to be a perfect place for him to grow up. #4 Bronson was eventually able to get away from his small town and go to the local school, but he was still confined to the small range of thought that a small, isolated town could provide. He began looking for ways to distance himself intellectually from his environment.

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.

Illuminates modern consumer culture and its challenges to American identity and values in two classic novels

Pulitzer Prize–winning author John Matteson illuminates three harrowing months of the Civil War and their enduring legacy for America. December 1862 drove the United States toward a breaking point. The Battle of Fredericksburg shattered Union forces and Northern confidence. As Abraham Lincoln’s government threatened to fracture, this critical moment also tested five extraordinary individuals whose lives reflect the soul of a nation. The changes they underwent led to profound repercussions in the country’s law, literature, politics, and popular mythology. Taken together, their stories offer a striking restatement of what it means to be American. Guided by patriotism, driven by desire, all five moved toward singular destinies. A young Harvard intellectual steeped in courageous ideals, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. confronted grave challenges to his concept of duty. The one-eyed army chaplain Arthur Fuller pitted his frail body against the evils of slavery. Walt Whitman, a gay Brooklyn poet condemned by the guardians of propriety, and Louisa May Alcott, a struggling writer seeking an authentic voice and her father’s admiration, tended soldiers’ wracked bodies as nurses. On the other side of the national schism, John Pelham, a West Point cadet from Alabama, achieved a unique excellence in artillery tactics as he served a doomed and misbegotten cause. A Worse Place Than Hell brings together the prodigious forces of war with the intimacy of individual lives. Matteson interweaves the historic and the personal in a work as beautiful as it is powerful.

Chronicles the joys and sorrows of the four March sisters as they grow into young ladies in nineteenth-century New England, in an annotated edition that looks at the work in biographical, social, and historical contexts.

“Psychologically rich. . . . Matteson’s book restores the heroism of [Fuller’s] life and work.”—The New Yorker A brilliant writer and a fiery social critic, Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) was perhaps the most famous American woman of her generation. Outspoken and quick-witted, idealistic and adventurous, she became the leading female figure in the transcendentalist movement, wrote a celebrated column of literary and social commentary for Horace Greeley’s newspaper, and served as the first foreign correspondent for an American newspaper. While living in Europe she fell in love with an Italian nobleman, with whom she became pregnant out of wedlock. In 1848 she joined the fight for Italian independence and, the following year, reported on the struggle while nursing the wounded within range of enemy cannons. Amid all these strivings and achievements, she authored the first great work of American feminism: Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Despite her brilliance, however, Fuller suffered from self-doubt and was plagued by ill health. John Matteson captures Fuller’s longing to become ever better, reflected by the changing lives she led.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize--a powerful love story set against the backdrop of the Civil War, from the author of The Secret Chord. From Louisa May Alcott's beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has animated the character of the absent father, March, and crafted a story "filled with the ache of love and marriage and with the power of war upon the mind and heart of one unforgettable man" (Sue Monk Kidd). With "pitch-perfect writing" (USA Today), Brooks follows March as he leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause in the Civil War. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs. A lushly written, wholly original tale steeped in the details of another time, March secures Geraldine Brooks's place as a renowned author of historical fiction.