Amos Bronson Alcott

Reformer, philosopher, writer, visionary, teacher

From the 1840s to the 1880s, in Concord, Massachusetts, there lived an extraordinary man.  He left his mark on all whom he touched, among them Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.  Though a poor man, he provided for his family as best he could.  Though deprived of his schoolteaching career by local bigots, he was thoroughly an educator in the deepest sense of the word.  Though at first rejected by many Christians, he followed the teachings of Jesus as he understood them with undisputable religious fervor.  Not content to merely preach his views, Amos Bronson Alcott acted on his beliefs with such conviction that he became—if not the most well-known—perhaps the most comprehensively “transcendental” of all the New England Transcendentalists.