"The book is divided geographically into chapters, each focusing on a town or village famous for its relationship to one or more of the Transcendentalists. Thus, for instance, one chapter spotlights Cambridge, where Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his path-breaking lectures, while another explores Walden, when Henry David Thoreau spent two years attuning himself to the rhythms of nature. Other chapters retrace the paths of writers and poets such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and Margaret Fuller through Salem, Amherst, Boston, and Concord and the utopian communities of Brook Farm and the Fruitlands."

"The book is divided geographically into chapters, each focusing on a town or village famous for its relationship to one or more of the Transcendentalists. Thus, for instance, one chapter spotlights Cambridge, where Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his path-breaking lectures, while another explores Walden, when Henry David Thoreau spent two years attuning himself to the rhythms of nature. Other chapters retrace the paths of writers and poets such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and Margaret Fuller through Salem, Amherst, Boston, and Concord and the utopian communities of Brook Farm and the Fruitlands."