DB Dialogues: Bruce Nichols on the Friendships, Rivalries, and Extraordinary Minds of the Emerson Circle
What was going on in Concord in the 1840s?
A few months ago, Kate wrote about why some groups thrive while others fizzle, and one of her examples of the former phenomenon was the philosophical and intellectual hotbed that sprang up in Concord, Massachusetts in the mid-19th century.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, the Alcotts, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and other lesser-known lights all rubbed shoulders and shaped one another’s ideas — and ultimately American culture up through the present day.
What’s interesting about the Concord community is that most of the influential literary scenes everybody remembers came out of big cities like Paris, London, and New York. Concord was a quiet farming town. How does something like that develop out in the sticks? And once it does, how does it survive a room full of big egos and bigger ambitions?
Bruce Nichols has thought about these questions for a long time. He grew up in Concord in a Unitarian household where Emerson and Thoreau were basically saints. Then he spent thirty-eight years in publishing, a career that included reissuing some of the aforementioned writers’ works.
Bruce’s new book, The Emerson Circle, takes a step back to give a group portrait of the members of the Concord community — many of whom were Transcendentalists and formed that influential movement. Bruce explores how these folks found each other, and both leaned on and competed with each other.
We talked about why Concord sparked an incomparable flowering of thought, why the community worked, what tensions grew up between its members, and whether you could ever build a group like this on purpose — or whether it just happens by dumb luck.
