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  • The American Scholar

    The Capital of Self-Reliance

    Sep 01, 2021 4 minutes
    Review by Anne Matthews

    THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS AND THEIR WORLD

    BY ROBERT A. GROSS

    Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 864 pp. $40

    “I HAVE NEVER GOT over my surprise that I should have been born into the most estimable place in all the world,” Henry Thoreau told his journal in 1856, “—& in the very nick of time, too.”

    The citizens of Concord, Massachusetts, have hyped their home for centuries: first town to rout the British, transcendentalist mecca, birthplace of the Concord grape, America’s perfect village. They may have overdone it (Thoreau’s old house on Main Street is now valued at $2.6 million), but the paper trail is extraordinary, and reconstructing Concord between

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