Librarian's note: This an alternate cover for: 9780674903333

Before the American Civil War, in Boston and its environs, a group of writers and thinkers belonging primarily to the Unitarian Church and its cultural milieu, profoundly affected by the Romantic movement in literature that was spreading across the Atlantic from Europe, began to think and write in a new manner-a manner that in its style and subject later became seen, especially in the examples of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, as "distinctly American."

Emerson and Thoreau are still well known today, but there were many others who created the context for their thought, and are scarcely known outside of scholarly circles: Margaret Fuller, James Freeman Clarke, Frederic Henry Hedge, Orestes A. Brownson, George Ripley, Jones Very. The Transcendentalists is the first and only anthology to collect the works of these lesser-known lights and offer them to the wider public.

"My conviction, which I trust the book will confirm, is that the group who composed the Transcendental movement' of the 1830's were writers of extraordinary abilities and of still more extraordinary intensities ... they were ... caught up in a crisis of the spirit and of the nation, a crisis that carries immense implications for the American predicament not only in their time but also in ours ... they managed to get into print enough pertinent and penetrating things about the nature of this society, or to give expression in poetry and criticism to aspirations at work deep within it, to achieve in the sum total of their work a significance that really does transcend the boundaries of their time and their place." -from Perry Miller's introduction.

Until his death in 1963, Perry Miller was Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard. His other books published include The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, Errand into the Wilderness, and Nature's Nation.