Since his death, Bronson Alcott has been known best as Louisa May Alcott's father. Nevertheless, he was important in his own right as a central figure in American Transcendentalism and in the swirl of mid-nineteenth-century reform that included the fight against slavery, economic inequality, inadequate schools, and the subjugation of women. He wrestled with critical religious and philosophical questions and personified the search for the spiritual amid the surge of capitalist democracy and the cultural resistance to the growing dominance of technology and materialism.

As a purely literary figure, his legacy was marginal. He failed to develop a style compelling enough to allow his work to stand by itself beyond the context of the ideas and movements he represented. Contemporary critics found Alcott's most uplifting expression in his public "conversations"; unfortunately, he lacked an adequate mechanism for preserving that expression except as arid transcriptions by observers. However, he...