New Books In Literary Studies

Megan Marshall is the Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor in writing, literature and publishing. Her book Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (Mariner Books, 2013) won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in biography. Marshall has written a beautiful and detailed portrait of the nineteenth-century political thinker, women’s rights advocate, and writer Margaret Fuller. Fuller’s childhood begins in Cambridgeport, MA where under the tutelage of her demanding father, Timothy Fuller, she was immersed in the classics excelling in language, literature, and philosophy. Her prospects limited by her gender, considered plain and often lonely, Fuller went on to build an intellectual life and relationships with the leading transcendentalists. Her New England circles included the most prominent thinkers of her day, the Channings, the Peabody sisters, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley, and Nathaniel Hawthrone. Frequently earning a living as a teacher, she went on to write and edit the transcendentalist journal The D