The Transcendentalists and Their World is both an intimate journey into the life of a community and a searching cultural study of major American writers as they plumbed the depths of the universe for spiritual truths and surveyed the rapidly changing contours of their own neighborhoods. No American community of the nineteenth century has been recovered so richly and with so acute an awareness of its place in the larger American story. Robert Gross is joined in conversation by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon Wood.