From an early review: "Cheever focuses on three houses that were, at various times, home to a mind-boggling range of bohemian literary bigs — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller — while also working in bits about the neighbors (Henry James, Oliver Wendell Holmes) and the larger circle of friends (Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe)."

Is definitely worth a read for those who want to see the transcendentalists as they were to each other: Emerson and Hawthorne desperately in love and fighting with each other over Margaret Fuller, who neither had the guts to be with because she was such a strong woman (and inspired novels by Henry James and Hawthorne, among others).

Meanwhile, you have Emerson acting as a "sugar daddy" (Cheever's term) by paying for other like-minded individuals to move to town. Emerson paid for part of Thoreau's tuition at Harvard. When he left for Europe he left the young man to live with his family. While he was away Thoreau more or less fell in love or infatuation with Emerson's wife--whose children similarly adored Thoreau. That seems to be the end of his romantic interests that we know of.

Emerson also helped set up the perpetually under-funded Hawthorne, the sometimes homeless Thoreau and most significantly, Bronson Alcott, who was a first rate nut case.

I mean serious nut ball who never supported his family. He was also a bore, at one point driving Hawthorne out of his mind by standing by the side of the road waiting for someone to come by so he could give them a "free" lecture. The two were neighbors.

Thoreau was about 20 when Louisa May Alcott moved to town, he was her teacher and first big crush. He was a first rate naturalist and took children into the woods with him.

Later in life Louisa May took on the sugar daddy role, financially supporting everyone in her orbit just as Emerson did. She began writing bad prose (which she acknowledged to be hideous) in order to support her family. At one point Bronson had the family living on a commune that was of course a total disaster. Louisa May eventally wrote a satirical novel about that time called "Transcendental Wild Oats". Sounds like a hoot.

Thoreau was the one they all loved and thought to be the genius. People who haven't read Walden think it is peaceful but this man was on fire when he wrote it. (It was not written while he was living in the woods either). By the way, he died eventually in part because of the graphite dust he inhaled while in the pencil business.

Admittedly I wrote poorly in trying to be brief. It is certainly true that Emerson and the transcendentalists have had an impact on American thought. Unfortunately the American thought they influenced has been confined to a tiny minority of people. What I meant is that they had a tiny effect on Americanism. What most affected American character and personality was our frontier experience that made us the pragmatic, materialistic, individualistic folks we are known around the world to be. Emerson and the transcendentalists had nothing to do with that and I could argue would have actively opposed it.

The self or individual of Emerson's writings on self-reliance and the like is not analogous, nor remotely synonymous, with the self, individual or me-me-me of 20th Century consumerism, feel-good pop-spiritualism or conservative boot-strap assholery. Miller seems to pick up on this when she writes how Transcendentalists were, if anything, uniformly concerned about "the materialistic, status-conscious ruthlessness of life under the reign of industrial capitalism." Why she deviates from this in the end by suggesting "Some of us have even managed to convince ourselves that individualism is the only viable route to social justice, sharing Emerson's faith in self-reliance as the consummate virtue," is beyond me. I know Emerson said "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," but here I think she misses the point.

Emerson is not easily digested as a pull 'em up by your bootstraps kind of libertarian-republican, though its a popular characterization. The influence of German Idealists, to whom we owe the intellectual foundations for Marxism and Socialism, should not be lightly regarded with Emerson, whose "Transcendentalism" takes itself as a descendent of Immanuel Kant's Transcendental Idealism. In this respect, Emerson has as a grand pillar of everything he said about taking care of one self an understanding of each individual's emergence from their own self-imposed immaturity (spiritually, intellectually, politically, culturally) as one that does not happen in a social vacuum. For Emerson though, social justice is naive if it alone is held up as the transforming ethos of a people. It is no wonder that in his time he was especially suspicious of activism in a time when people were still learning to be modern, to be members of advanced states and polities.

In an era that can actually reflect on its own immaturity with phrases like "Me-First Generation," rather than its coming out of that immaturity, it is ironic that anyone claim Emerson's distance from activism as an ancestor of today's so-called individualism. I say it is so-called because there is no individual of today's so-called individualism that is not subsumed by the -ism of it. Today's individualism, including counter-individualisms that claim to be more authentically individualistic than naive sub-urban individualism, are what Freddie Nietzsche derided as "herd-mentalities." They do not rely upon the self or individual, but the popular attitude that the individual comes before all else. The individual of individualism is despite its most resolute denials still dependent on the affirmation of something or someone, if not many things and many someones, outside of themselves. There is no individual to individualism, but a socially constructed shell in which everything else from outside is stuffed.

No, Emerson is not responsible for, much less supportive of the me-me-me attitude we all seem to agree is a problem. Emerson's self has no room for the me-me-me attitude, for its feel-good opulence, and in that its occasional feel-good activism.