Margaret Fuller: Collected Writings (Loa #388) - (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

"Humanity can be divided into three classes: men, women, and Margaret Fuller."--Edgar Allan Poe

A true American original--radical transcendentalist, intrepid journalist, and pioneering feminist--joins Library of America with the most authoritative single-volume collection of her writings ever, including many rare and previously unpublished works, newly transcribed from original notebooks and journals

Transcendentalist, journalist, feminist, activist, public intellectual, war correspondent, poet: Margaret Fuller's achievement in her short life was as diverse, wide-ranging, and radical as her multi-generic writings. Now, at long last, this pioneering writer joins Library of America with the most comprehensive and most authoritative version of her writings ever published.

Here are her two best-known books: Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, an account of her travels to the Great Lakes, a plea for better treatment of the American Indian peoples, and a sketchbook of Fuller's thought; and Woman in the Nineteenth Century, the foundational document of American feminism and the first major work on women's rights since Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman fifty-three years earlier.

Joining them are a generous selection of Fuller's published essays and journalism, including "American Literature" and her reviews and columns for the New York Tribune, as well as her war correspondence from besieged Rome in 1849; unpublished writings and selections from Fuller's journals, many previously unknown and newly transcribed for this volume; and a selection of Fuller's letters, including three newly translated from the original Italian.

Rounding out the volume are a chronology by Fuller's biographer Megan Marshall, along with helpful notes identifying Fuller's many allusions and quotations, and an index.

About the Author

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) was a woman of action as well as ideas. Her life is itself a great American story, from precocious influence on Emerson and Thoreau and the rest of the New England Tracendentalists, to her years as a front-page newspaper columnist in New York, to her passionate engagement as a war correspondent and hospital superintendant in Italy. Her far-sighted writing--two books, numerous essays, poems and short fiction, and a vibrant archive of unpublished journals and letters--speaks to readers today with exceptional insight and relevance.

Brigitte Bailey is Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of American Travel Literature, Gendered Aesthetics, and the Italian Tour, 1824-1862 (2018), co-editor of Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain (2012) and Margaret Fuller and Her Circles (2013), and former president of the Margaret Fuller Society. Dr. Noelle A. Baker, an independent scholar, is editor of Stanton in Her Own Time (2016) and co-editor of The Almanacks of Mary Moody Emerson: A Scholarly Digital Edition (ongoing). She is editor in chief of the open-access, peer-reviewed journal Scholarly Editing and has served on the advisory board of the Margaret Fuller Transnational Archive and as an officer of the Margaret Fuller Society. Megan Marshall is the Charles Wesley Emerson Professor at Emerson College. She is the author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Biography; The Peabody Sisters (2005) winner of the Francis Parkman Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart (2025). She is a past president of the Society of American Historians and has served on the board of the Margaret Fuller Society.