Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography

 

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 €œdiscovered€ 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 fortieth 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.