Concord was home to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Alcotts, but from the 1820s through the 1840s this New England town was no pastoral place fit for poets and philosophers. Founded by Puritans and the site of a major battle in the Revolution, Concord was experiencing rapid, unsettling changes by the time that the Transcendentalists began their careers. In his magnum opus, the author of The Minutemen and Their World offers an in-depth look at the town, its everyday citizens, and the writers who drew inspiration from it to write books of universal significance.

"A measured, beautiful volume that brings warm life, accuracy, and complexity to local history, swooping between the bird's-eye view and the tracery of many individual destinies…. Illuminating."—Atlantic