Three Roads Back

October 3, 2022
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James had their ideas solidified and their writing shaped by the deaths of loved ones, according to this stimulating posthumous survey from Richardson (William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism), who died in 2020. Using a technique he calls “documentary biography,” which lets his subjects “tell their stories in their own words as much as possible” via their letters and journals, Richardson makes a case that the three can teach their readers great resilience, as each carried on despite the losses. In Richardson’s account, Emerson lost his faith, resigned from his position as a minister, and became a naturalist as he was coping with the death of his wife, Ellen; Thoreau began ruminating on what became his “mature philosophical vision” as a result of his brother, John’s, death; and out of Minnie Temple’s early death “arrived” her cousin James’s central psychological insight of “resisting the ego to the world.” Richard moves swiftly and confidently among his subjects, and successfully ditches “a detached, critical, or judgmental” approach in favor of a moving, candid group portrait. Fans and students of American literature will find this worth picking up.

Starred review from October 15, 2022
Illuminating stories of how three of America's most celebrated authors charted pathways to healing. In this brief but remarkably rich study, Richardson (1934-2020) explores how three giants of American thought--Emerson, Thoreau, and William James--struggled with and found vital ways of transcending the grief brought on by losing a loved one. The author, who has written celebrated full-length biographies of each of the figures, provides what he terms a "documentary biography," deftly guiding readers through copious quotations drawn from his subjects' letters and journals. Such an approach, he explains, seeks to "facilitate a personal, even sympathetic, connection--rather than a detached, critical, or judgmental connection--between the reader and the subject." This aim is vividly realized in the book's informed and deeply moving considerations of responses to loss. Memorably, we hear from Emerson on his revelatory visit to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, which provoked in him a salvific sense of "the wonder and power and interconnectedness of Nature" after the death of his young wife; Thoreau, who, in the aftermath of his brother's death, documented his emerging understanding of natural processes of destruction and creation as ultimately life-affirming; and James, whose cherished cousin's death finally provoked in him a hard-won awareness that the cultivation of self-discipline and self-government could be the vehicle for extraordinary personal resilience. With great sensitivity, Richardson explains the relationship between personal trauma and the philosophical insights that might be generated in its wake, and his restrained but clarifying commentary allows his subjects' voices to compel our attention. The author expertly frames the emotional and intellectual lives of these three significant artistic figures and demonstrates the relevance, for anyone, of what they accomplished in their profound negotiations with loss. A stirring and keenly perceptive examination of bereavement and recovery.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.