Pedlar’s Progress

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention, and heartily recommend, the book I just finished reading: Pedlar’s Progress: The Life of Bronson Alcott, by Odell Shepard. Published in 1937 in Boston by Little, Brown and Company, this masterpiece of biography was the publisher’s Centenary Prize Book, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1938. It’s easily one of the best biographies I’ve read, and I’ve read many. Shepard’s work, research, and interpretation of Alcott’s life reaches far beyond his subject, and brings to life the cultural scene of Concord and New England in the days of Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Hawthorne, and others associated with Transcendentalism. It also shines light on the Alcott family, which was made famous by Alcott’s more famous daughter, Louisa May Alcott, notably in Little Women, and shows that family as the intimate, mutually supportive unit it was, despite and because of the poverty it was made to endure, and which was the inevitable outcome of Alcott’s quixotic life’s work. Simply put, I found the book inspiring, both in terms of the quality of its writing and in Alcott’s life itself. Copies are still easy enough to find.

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