Best remembered as the author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), Margaret Fuller has been celebrated as one of the foremost social critics of her day. Her importance as a feminist theorist has doubtless contributed to her not being widely recognized as a pathbreaking travel writer. Her Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (1844)--which records her travels from Niagara Falls through the Great Lakes to Illinois and Wisconsin--helped to define American literary travel writing at the same time that it analyzed patterns of western settlement on the frontier. As a pioneering columnist for the New-York Tribune several years later, Fuller visited the city's asylums, prisons, and mental institutions. Her records of these visits function as a kind of urban travel writing, analyzing the ways in which the inmates of various institutions had been viewed as tourist attractions analogous to the "picturesque" American Indians of Michigan and Wisconsin. Finally, Fuller's European dispatches, published under the heading "Things and Thoughts in Europe" in the New-York Daily Tribune, examined European culture at one of its pivotal moments--the years surrounding the revolutionary outbreaks of 1848.
