Margaret Fuller

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for BiographyFrom an early age, Margaret Fuller provoked and dazzled New Englands intellectual elite. Her famous Conversations changed womens sense of how they could think and live; her editorship of the Transcendentalist literary journal the Dial shaped American Romanticism. Now, Megan Marshall, whose acclaimed The Peabody Sisters discovered three fascinating women, has done it again: no biography of Fuller has made her ideas so alive or her life so moving. Marshall tells the story of how Fuller, tired of Boston, accepted Horace Greeleys offer to be the New-York Tribunes front-page columnist. The move unleashed a crusading concern for the urban poor and the plight of prostitutes, and a late-in-life hunger for passionate experience. In Italy as a foreign correspondent, Fuller took a secret lover, a young officer in the Roman Guard; she wrote dispatches on the brutal 1849 Siege of Rome; and she gave birth to a son. Yet, when all three died in a shipwreck off Fire Island shortly after Fullers fortieth birthday, the sense and passion of her lifes work were eclipsed by tragedy and scandal. Marshalls inspired account brings an American heroine back to indelible life.