Three Roads Back: How Emerson, Thoreau, and William James Responded to the Greatest Losses of Their Lives

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James had their ideas solidified and their writing shaped by the deaths of loved ones, according to this stimulating posthumous survey from Richardson (William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism), who died in 2020. Using a technique he calls “documentary biography,” which lets his subjects “tell their stories in their own words as much as possible” via their letters and journals, Richardson makes a case that the three can teach their readers great resilience, as each carried on despite the losses. In Richardson’s account, Emerson lost his faith, resigned from his position as a minister, and became a naturalist as he was coping with the death of his wife, Ellen; Thoreau began ruminating on what became his “mature philosophical vision” as a result of his brother, John’s, death; and out of Minnie Temple’s early death “arrived” her cousin James’s central psychological insight of “resisting the ego to the world.” Richard moves swiftly and confidently among his subjects, and successfully ditches “a detached, critical, or judgmental” approach in favor of a moving, candid group portrait. Fans and students of American literature will find this worth picking up. (Jan.)