Pedlar's Progress: The Life of Bronson Alcott
by Odell Shepard
Summary
Odell Shepard titles his biography of Amos Bronson Alcott with a double reference, to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and to the young Alcott's actual first trade, a traveling Yankee peddler working the roads of the Carolinas before he ever opened a schoolroom. The book follows Alcott from a childhood with almost no formal education, he left a one room Connecticut schoolhouse at ten and taught himself the rest, through that peddling apprenticeship and into the career that made him notorious rather than merely obscure, his Temple School in Boston, opened in 1834, where he threw out textbooks and rote recitation in favor of open conversation with children about ethics and the Gospels.
Shepard traces how that experiment collapsed under public pressure once Alcott published his students' unfiltered questions about the Bible, a scandal that emptied the school from roughly thirty pupils to eleven within three years, and follows him into the Transcendentalist circle around Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, where Alcott became a genuine intellectual presence even as Emerson, his most loyal patron, privately doubted whether Alcott's talk ever survived being put on paper. The book gives real space to Fruitlands, the vegetarian utopian farm Alcott founded with Charles Lane in 1843, a seven month experiment that failed for the plainest of reasons, thin soil and a community too committed to principle to plant enough food, and to the chronic poverty that dogged Alcott and his family for decades afterward.
Shepard does not let Alcott's idealism off easily, showing a man whose commitment to conscience repeatedly cost his wife and four daughters real security, most famously Louisa May Alcott, who later turned her own girlhood into Little Women. Reading the book means watching an earnest, sometimes maddening reformer chase educational and social principle at real cost to the people who depended on him, and it suits a reader drawn to the odder corners of the Transcendentalist movement, the true believers who never became as famous as Emerson and Thoreau but shaped the same circle from close range.
Historical Context & Significance
Pedlar's Progress shared the 1938 Pulitzer Prize for Biography with Marquis James's The Life of Andrew Jackson, an unusual year in which the board recognized two books rather than choosing between them. Little, Brown published the biography in 1937, the product of Odell Shepard's long academic career studying the Transcendentalists; Shepard taught English at Trinity College in Connecticut for nearly thirty years and edited editions of Thoreau, Longfellow, and Alcott's own daughter Louisa May.
Shepard later left the classroom for politics, serving as lieutenant governor of Connecticut in the early 1940s, but his reputation rests on this biography, still regarded as the standard full length life of Bronson Alcott. Alcott himself remains a minor, specialist interest figure next to his daughter and his Transcendentalist friends, and Shepard's book is largely what keeps his own story in print at all, a founder's biography for a man mostly remembered now as somebody else's father.