John MattesonRezensionen

Amos Bronson Alcott and his daughter Louisa May didn't always see eye to eye. He was a friend of Emerson and Thoreau's, a staunch abolitionists and a vegetarian, a philosopher, a teacher, yet always poor and in debt. His daughter Louisa was temperamentally was much like her mother and sometimes had her father at his wit's end with her impetuousness and spirit. Then, as she grew older she was much more practical and desirous of the comforts solvency can bring.

In this dual biography of Bronson and his famous daughter, John Matteson draws on the wealth of writings, including personal journals and letters, of the Alcott family to illuminate not just two lives but their changing relationship. Matteson does occasionally venture a little too far in his surmising (I noted a passage where he took Louisa's love for Jane Eyre as potentially linked to her fascination with the idea of mental health being hereditary), and tends to see a lot more autobiography in Louisa's fiction that I thought was perhaps warranted. Still, this well-researched, Pulitzer-prize winning book is a thorough and entertaining read, illuminating these two fascinating people in light of their relationship which each other. Born on the same day 33 years apart and dying within days of each other, Bronson and Louisa may not have always seen eye to eye, but they clearly loved each other and grew in mutual respect over the years. Well worth reading for anyone interested in literary history, Massachusetts history, or Transcendentalists.

Pulitzer Prize–winning author John Matteson illuminates three harrowing months of the Civil War and their ineradicable legacy for America.
In December 1862, the Battle of Fredericksburg shattered Union forces and threatened to break apart Abraham Lincoln's government. Five extraordinary individuals experienced Fredericksburg's cataclysmic repercussions—Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, John Pelham, and Arthur Fuller. Guided by duty, driven by desire, they moved toward lofty destinies: a young Harvard intellectual steeped in courageous ideals, a gay Brooklyn poet condemned by guardians of propriety, a struggling writer desperate to serve the cause and gain her philosopher father's admiration, a West Point cadet from Alabama excelling in artillery tactics, and a one-eyed minister seeking to prove his manhood.

Because of what they saw and suffered, America, too, would never be the same. In A Worse Place Than...

Dr.Matteson has done it again - writing a well researched history on a historical turning point in the Civil War. The book is personalized by focusing on five primary players Whitman, Alcott, Holmes Jr., Fuller and Pelham who are all changed significantly by the signiture event - the Battle of Frdericksburg. Two are primarily soldiers, two are literary and and one is watching things from a religious perspective. The characters are portrayed in a respectful, sensitive fulfilling way. This book is well worth all the acclaim that it received.

A very special book. So informative and well-written. I can see why it won the Pulitzer. I'm a native of eastern Massachusetts, and I love reading about Transcendentalists, specially because I can easily visit sites in Boston and Concord.

Matteson did a great job writing a double biography, pulling from a huge number of sources. At first Bronson was the focus. I had a very negative opinion of him before reading this; after reading it, I'm still not going to run out and try to find one of his old books. But I have more respect for him as a parent and teacher than I did previously. I was very surprised to learn that the experiment at Fruitlands lasted only seven months and involved so few people. I visited Fruitlands for the first time in the fall and it is quite developed as a history site, given the short time they spent there.

I have even more respect for Louisa after reading about her lifelong struggle with "moods," and the therapeutic poisoning she suffered when serving as a Civil War nurse in Washington, D.C. After six weeks, she was too sick to continue and was sent home to recover, but never again to feel well. And yet she soldiered on, intent on making her writing pay the bills that her father seemed unable and unwilling to pay with his own labor. Even her great novel, Little Women, was something she wrote at her publisher's request. She was never able to produce her masterpiece for adults.

I very much enjoyed this book, it was well-researched, vivid, and read very well. I recommend reading it with Eve LaPlante's Marmee & Louisa, a joint biography of Abigail May Alcott and their daughter, Louisa, which has a different view of Bronson Alcott. Matteson is by no means uncritical of Bronson and his many faults, but LaPlante has a far less flattering view of him, and she lets him condemn himself out of his own mouth. I should probably find a biography of Louisa alone. I think that Matteson has much more sympathy for Bronson, and seems very happy that his last years were far more successful than the rest of his life. This book, of course, says a great deal more about Bronson's relationship with his daughters than the other, though less about his relationship with his wife. Reading both gives a better picture of the family as a whole.

Personally, I never has any interest in Transcendentalism (I have only recently read Philip Gura's excellent American Transcendentalism), because it seemed to me that so many Transcendentalists were dependent fools, with Bronson Alcott, then and now, as Exhibit #1. (I haven't the heart to tell my friends, who admire some of them, what I think about the others. I don't want them falling dead at my feet from a stroke, or hitting me over the head with their chair.) I've read several of Louisa May Alcott's books, including Little Women, which I enjoyed, but since I didn't identify at all with Jo, I seem to be an outlier (again.)

Bronson may have meant well, but he generally didn't do well. My prime example is that having moved his family to Fruitlands, and leaving the domestic work to Abigail, and the children, except for the brief period when Anna Page was there, and occasional help from her aunt, Hannah Robie. So much for the oral feminism that was part of what attracted Abigail to Bronson in the first place. Then, Bronson, the farmer's son, and the rest of the men, went off leaving the crop in the field, and it was left to Abigail and the children to save it in the face of a storm.

Pictures, generally of high quality, of many places and people are interwoven with the text, a system that I find preferable to an independent section of plates, if all of the illustrations are black and white. There is both a bibliography and an extensive section of bibliographical notes. It used to be common for the title of a chapter to run along the top of the pages, while the notes contained only the chapter number. I am glad to see that the fault is NOT repeated here. There is also a detailed index; I didn't notice any flaws while using it.

I'm happy to see that Matteson also wrote a biography of Margaret Fuller, the next Transcendentalist that I intend to check out.

Really good book. Love the differences and similarities between father and daughter!

so detailed; a lot to learn in here

I'm very much the right audience for this book--I read Little Women and its sequels too many times to count when I was growing up, and in fact at one point named one of my dolls Louisa May Alcott Bassham. (Between this book and My Wilder Life, the last couple of months have been a real trip down Memory Lane.)

But leaving that aside, Matteson does great work in this book. It's a dual biography of Louisa and her father Bronson (they died a mere three days apart), who are both fascinating characters. Matteson has obviously done a lot of research, but he wears it lightly. He writes well; the book was simply a joy to read. I only wish I'd read it before we visited the Alcott house a couple of years ago.

@ Louisa + Bronson Alcott
Pulitzer Prize - Winner

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.

Superb and powerful biography of LMA and her father Bronson. Best bio I have read in years.

I'm very much the right audience for this book--I read Little Women and its sequels too many times to count when I was growing up, and in fact at one point named one of my dolls Louisa May Alcott Bassham. (Between this book and My Wilder Life, the last couple of months have been a real trip down Memory Lane.)

But leaving that aside, Matteson does great work in this book. It's a dual biography of Louisa and her father Bronson (they died a mere three days apart), who are both fascinating characters. Matteson has obviously done a lot of research, but he wears it lightly. He writes well; the book was simply a joy to read. I only wish I'd read it before we visited the Alcott house a couple of years ago.

John Matteson really did his homework. Well written and well researched. This book sent me off in pursuit of more. Bronson Alcott is an amazing man. What a treat to delve into his life and the lives of his family. There is a lot of depth to this book. It sent me off on tangents that made it hard for me to finish. Fascinating family.

Margaret Fuller (1810-50) was the only woman to be included in the Concord circle of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The author of the groundbreaking "Woman in the Nineteenth Century" and a war correspondent for the New York Tribune, Fuller returned home from her adventures in Italy only to drown 250 yards from the shore of her native land. She is a natural choice for biographers wanting to latch onto both a serious and sensational subject -- and several biographers have done so in recent years.

But as John Matteson shows in "The Lives of Margaret Fuller," it was not always so. By the early 20th century, Fuller had been largely forgotten. Even academics -- who can keep a reputation alive by teaching writers into the literary canon -- ignored her because she was a one-book author, and because much of her impact derived from a charismatic personality so powerful that when she died Emerson said he had lost his audience.

Right after her death her fellow writers assembled a volume devoted to her memory that was a surprise bestseller, eclipsed only by the publication of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in 1852. But the kind of mostly pious, inspirational tributes that led to the proliferation of Margaret Fuller clubs in the decades after her death had played itself out by the 1920s, when scholars of all kinds were canonizing great writers, not great personalities.

Flash forward 50 years to the 1970s, with the revival of the women's movement and the desire in academia to revise the canon to give voice to the writings of women the male-dominated academy had discounted. Suddenly Fuller's writing and cultural influence became empowering -- to use a favorite academic word. And the culmination of this trend is surely Matteson's masterful biography, with chapter titles that emphasize the reasons his protean subject is likely to remain in the forefront of efforts to explore and dissect the American psyche: "Prodigy," "Misfit," "Apostle," "Conversationalist," "Ecstatic Editor," "Seeker of Utopia," "Advocate," "Lover and Critic," "Internationalist," "Inamorata," "Revolutionary," "Victim."

Pulitzer Prize winner Matteson expresses his significant debts to other biographers who have emphasized many of the "lives" that Fuller led as she was quite consciously breaking the mold her society wished to construct for women. His writing seems to derive palpable energy from Fuller's own dynamism. He does not downplay her arrogance and other faults, but in the end he discovers a Fuller that is startlingly modern in her contradictions and commitments.

Eden's Outcasts is an outstanding double biography of Louisa May Alcott and her father, Bronson Alcott. I was very impressed at the author's balancing act for all the disparate themes touched on in subjects lives.

Matteson gives a full background and exploration of the life and influences on Bronson Alcott, and his circle of contemporary transcendentalists. For the reader who comes to this biography wanting to know more about Louisa May Alcott, this background is illuminating. But Matteson gives Bronson's life full and compelling coverage, and he never treats Bronson as only "Louisa's Father".

Having read other biographies (excellent ones) of Louisa May Alcott, I was wondering what new information this bio would provide. But Matteson's approach to Louisa's life and literary influences does explore areas which other biographers have not covered, and Matteson ties together his research and his theories into a fresh and exciting story.

Most importantly, I felt that Matteson did a wonderful job of sympathizing with his subject's human failings without becoming an apologist or providing justifications for the subject's actions. This is especially hard given the dual nature of this biography, and the fact that the two subjects were sometimes in conflict with one another. Matteson fearlessly explored places where his subjects were less than heroic. But he always did so respectfully and with an eye to a better understanding, rather than to place blame or cast judgment.

I would highly recommend this biography to anyone interested in Alcott, the Transcendentalist Philosophy, American Writers, Feminist History, or in knowing more about the author of Little Women. The writing is absolutely accessible to those outside of academia, without talking down to anyone.

4431. Eden's Outcasts The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, by John Matteson (read 27 Apr 2008) (Pulitzer Biography prize in 2008) This dual biography of Bronson Alcott and his famous daughter--they had their birthdays on Nov 29 and died on Mar 4 and Mar 6, 1888--is very well-done and shows excellent research. The early part which tells much of Bronson and his nutty ideas palled but once Louisa attained her majority the book became much more interesting, and I found the account of her writing full of interest. Her money worries ended when Little Women was published, and this is pleasing. The closing chapter, as in all good biographies, is excellently done and leaves one with a glowing feeling as to how good a book one has read.½