Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

Thoreau’s editor, Emerson’s friend, daring war correspondent and tragic heroine. From an early age Margaret Fuller dazzled New England’s intelligent elite. Her famous Conversations changed women’s sense of how they could think and live; her editorship of the Dial shaped American Romanticism. In her new book, author Megan Marshall tells the story of how Fuller, tired of Boston, accepted Horace Greeley’s offer to be the New York Tribune’s front-page columnist. The move unleashed a crusading concern for the urban poor and the plight of prostitutes, and a hunger for passionate experience. In Italy as a foreign correspondent, Fuller took a secret lover, wrote dispatches on the brutal 1849 Siege of Rome, and gave birth to a son. When all three died in a shipwreck off Fire Island shortly after Fuller’s 40th birthday, the sense and passion of her life’s work were eclipsed by tragedy and scandal. Join us for an evening with biographer Megan Marshall as she discusses the trailblazing life of Margaret Fuller.

Megan Marshall is the author of The Peabody Sisters, a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in biography and memoir. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic, New York Times Book Review, and Slate. She teaches in the MFA program at Emerson College. You can learn more on her website at http://meganmarshallauthor.com/index.shtml