He set out to make his utopian dream come true-Bronson Alcott, his wife and four daughters, and an odd assortment of friends who knew more about philosophy than they did about farming. Would their experience at Fruitlands last through the hard New England winter? Transcendentalist commune is for readers of all ages who love Alcott, history, or just a good story told with humor and sensitivity.

THIS 38 PAGE ARTICLE WAS EXTRACTED FROM THE BOOK: Bronson Alcott's Fruitlands With Transcendental Wild Oats, by Louisa May Alcott. To purchase the entire book, please order ISBN 0766180042.

This is a definitive account of Fruitlands, one of history's most unsuccessful, but most significant, utopian experiments. It was established in Massachusetts in 1843 by Bronson Alcott (whose ten year old daughter Louisa May, future author of Little Women, was among the members) and an Englishman called Charles Lane, under the watchful gaze of Emerson, Thoreau, and other New England intellectuals. Alcott and Lane developed their own version of the doctrine known as Transcendentalism, hoping to transform society and redeem the environment through a strict regime of veganism and celibacy. But physical suffering and emotional conflict, particularly between Lane and Alcott's wife, Abigail, made the community unsustainable. Drawing on the letters and diaries of those involved, the author explores the relationship between the complex philosophical beliefs held by Alcott, Lane, and their fellow idealists and their day to day lives. The result is a vivid and often very funny narrative of their travails, demonstrating the dilemmas and conflicts inherent to any utopian experiment and shedding light on a fascinating period of American history.

In June of 1843, Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane, both reformers involved in the Transcendentalist movement, founded Fruitlands in an attempt to strengthen their spirituality through self-reliant, simple living. Joinmed by their families and about a dozen other individuals, the Con-Sociate family (as they called themselves) was to bring about a new Eden by cultivating a mystical and scetic way of life in a rural retreat. Compiling, in their own words, from letters, diaries, and books, and from the comments of friends and associates such as Emerson and Thoreau, Clara Endicott Sears, founder of Fruitlands Museum, tells the story of this famous encounter of transcendental philosophy with the realities of the New England soil and climate and the vagaries of human nature. Louisa May Alcott's classic satire based on her father's experiment, "Transcendental Wild Oats," completes the picture of a noble failure.

A portrait of five Concord, Massachusetts, writers whose works were at the center of mid-nineteenth-century American thought and literature evaluates their interconnected relationships, influence on each other's works, and complex beliefs.

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.