Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (Unabridged)
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
Pulitzer Prize, Biography, 2014
From an early age, Margaret Fuller provoked and dazzled New England’s intellectual elite. Her famous Conversations changed women’s sense of how they could think and live; her editorship of the Transcendentalist literary journal the Dial shaped American Romanticism. Now, Megan Marshall, whose acclaimed The Peabody Sisters "discovered" three fascinating women, has done it again: No biography of Fuller has made her ideas so alive or her life so moving. Marshall tells the story of how Fuller, tired of Boston, accepted Horace Greeley’s offer to be the New-York Tribune’s front-page columnist. The move unleashed a crusading concern for the urban poor and the plight of prostitutes, and a late-in-life hunger for passionate experience. In Italy as a foreign correspondent, Fuller took a secret lover, a young officer in the Roman Guard; she wrote dispatches on the brutal 1849 Siege of Rome; and she gave birth to a son. Yet, when all three died in a shipwreck off Fire Island shortly after Fuller’s 40th birthday, the sense and passion of her life’s work were eclipsed by tragedy and scandal. Marshall’s inspired account brings an American heroine back to indelible life.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This Pulitzer Prize–winning biography about the astounding life of Margaret Fuller may just make the groundbreaking 19th-century writer your new heroine. Megan Marshall digs into the life of the journalist and activist, who had an influential role in the lives of writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau. Through Marshall’s impeccable research and evocative writing, we get to see Fuller’s accomplishments in the context of her time, when women who wanted a strong education were banned from most prestigious institutes of higher learning. From her fearless achievements as an investigative journalist to her tireless advocacy for the poor and marginalized to her admired career as a literary critic, every step in Fuller’s journey went against the grain of her male-dominated society. Narrator Cynthia Barrett brings an animated excitement to this revolutionary woman’s iconoclastic life story. Prepare to be inspired.
