American Bloomsbury

A tight-knit group of writers live and work together, animated by sexual electricity. The beautiful teenage novelist falls for an older poet who’s in love with another woman. The pioneering feminist journalist dies in a freak accident with her Italian lover, leaving behind a string of broken hearts. This was all happening in the 1850s, when Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, and Margaret Fuller lived in close quarters in the village of Concord, Massachusetts. Susan Cheever, the author of American Bloomsbury, tells Kurt about the surprisingly un-Victorian personal lives of these literary stars.