Orestes Augustus Brownson, a provincial Vermont man of hardscrabble origins, was welcomed into the tight, aristocratic circle of Boston Unitarian society by eminences such as William Ellery Channing and George Ripley, and he helped to start the Transcendental Club. In 1840 he wrote the best apologia of Transcendentalism against the charge of infidelity by Andrews Norton. His impoverished youth denied him formal schooling, but the self-taught man read and thought so widely that he wrote with hard-hitting authority about economics, religion, politics, philosophy, history, theology, and literature. Boston was replete with exciting intellectuals when he arrived, but his effective preaching, his knowledge of European philosophy, and his forceful style of conversation and journalism combined to make him a significant influence on Protestant intellectuals of Boston until 1844 when he became Catholic. Important enough for a section in A Fable for Critics ... (1864), Brownson is praised by James Russell Lowell for his...