Word: alcotts
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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LOUISA MAY ALCOTT - Katharine Anthony-Knopf...
When Van Wyck Brooks called the period of Hawthorne, Emerson and Bronson Alcott the flowering of New England, he did not use the phrase for its warm, poetic savor. Not only in Brooks's book but in lesser works like Odell Shepard's Pedlar's Progress: The Life of Branson Alcott, readers can catch whiffs of a morning freshness in the cultural air, when poets and novelists no less than practical citizens took on themselves lifetime projects, came back to work unshaken after personal tragedy or public disgrace...
...some ways the buoyant, penniless, unbreakable Bronson Alcott-who bounced up and down as good-naturedly as if the path from success to failure was the most pleasant and natural one in the world-symbolized this spirit better than anyone else...
Founded in boom days, the Temple School prospered only briefly. When Alcott published the Record of Conversations on the Gospels Held in Mr. Alcott's School, its theological and pedagogical heresies shocked Boston; the pupils dropped from 40 to 25, to ten, to three. Alcott shut up shop. He tried to open another school, had to close that in short order when he admitted a Negro child among the Brahmins. By this time he was $6,000 in debt...
With education in his blood, too, Alcott set out on the road once more. This time he peddled not notions but what he called Conversations- informal but high-souled colloquies of 20 or 30 people. These Conversations never degenerated into arguments; if they did, "Alcott simply took refuge in the uppermost silences...