Word: alcotts
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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PEDLAR'S PROGRESS : THE LIFE OF BRONSON ALCOTT - Odell Shepard - Little, Brown...
...Bronson Alcott? Few U. S. memories are long enough to answer. Fifty years ago a name to conjure with, he is known now, if at all. as the father of Louisa May Alcott, best-selling author (Little Women, Little Men). It is Biographer Shepard's well-presented thesis that Bronson Alcott is one of America's almost-forgotten great men. An ably-written, authoritative book, Pedlar's Progress deserves every penny of its $5,000 prize (Little, Brown Centenary), will fit snugly on the same shelf with Van Wyck Brooks's The Flowering of New England...
...Bronson Alcott's given name was Amos Bronson Alcox. He changed it not for euphony but to scotch smirks. Born (1799) a Connecticut farmer's son, Alcott had a good old-fashioned pastoral upbringing but little school. His immortal longings were not bounded by the farm's horizon: he was determined to better not only himself but the world. At 19 he left home to find himself and make his fortune, went as a pedlar of Yankee notions into the South. The hospitable Southerners took him in, taught him manners, lent him books. Commercially, his trips were...
...schoolteacher Alcott was a heretic from the start. His innovations-all aimed at drawing out rather than cramming the pupil-drew wide and often unfavorable attention. By the time he had married and started his famed Temple School in Boston he was known as an educational revolutionary. The Ph. D.'s of the day considered him a rank incompetent. "He turned over and tumbled up and down at least a thousand of the most influential books in the world . . . yet the total result never amounted to anything in the least like erudition. His faculty for ignoring and forgetting...
Runner-up last week was Dr. Walter Reed, conqueror of yellow fever, with 57 votes. Economist Henry George scored 56, Suffragist Susan B. Anthony 55, Author Henry David Thoreau 54. Louisa May Alcott with 28 showed her heels to Herman Melville with 24. Far down the list were William Holmes McGuffey (McGuffey's Readers), 17, and Jefferson Davis...