Although George Ripley was instrumental in the development of the New England philosophical, social, religious, and literary reform movement known as American Transcendentalism, he has been largely overlooked by literary scholars and historians, perhaps because he espoused multiple, seemingly unrelated causes rather than a single endeavor to which his name might be indisputably linked. Ripley was a true "American Renaissance man" whose forward-looking literary and social endeavors influenced not only the handful of nineteenth-century New England intellectuals associated with Transcendentalism but also the great masses of literate, knowledge-hungry, working-class American citizens. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ripley believed in the need to de-emphasize required forms and eliminate hierarchized religious intermediation from Unitarian doctrine; and like Henry David Thoreau, Ripley sought to change society for the better by reforming the individual. Similarly, like Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and Bronson Alcott, Ripley believed that education ought to be participatory, imaginative...