Author looks at private lives of 5 great writers

Even historians have devoted little study to just how much the great American writers of the 1830s interacted with each other. Which is why Susan Cheever decided to correct that oversight with "American Bloomsbury."

The book is an enriching look at the private lives of Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau. Ironically, these five writers lived in "the same cluster of three houses" in Concord, Mass.

In 2000, Cheever, a prolific novelist and memoirist, was asked to write an introduction to a new edition of Alcott's "Little Women," so she reread the book for background. She was impressed with its "elegance, sense of irony, texture and sensual detail," and she became "obsessed" with Alcott and the other writers of her era.

"All the best things happen by accident," Cheever said by phone from her New York City home. "It may even be the mother of creativity. In my life, accident and indirection have been very influential. Then, as I read more about these people, it began to seem like destiny."

Cheever was determined to know what was going on beneath the surface. "Maybe people are not well served when they are revered — it dehumanizes them. I hadn't read Thoreau's 'Walden' in 30 years either. When I reread it, I was amazed. He was so angry and so eloquent! And you know, these people had so much trouble getting along with other people."

She found many connections between them. "They inspired each other; they sold houses to each other; they planted each other's gardens; they delivered vegetables to each other; they helped each other in every conceivable way."

And life was so different in the 19th century; it was not easy. "They were always cold; there was no medicine that worked; there were no dentists; there was almost no old age. So many were taken so early. Alcott was considered old at 36."

Cheever visited Concord during several summers, focusing more and more on the writers and reading their letters. "It took a long time for me to figure out how to structure it, to tell about five people over 20 years without repeating myself."

She is exuberant about the writers: "They wrote the greatest books of all time. There was lots of reading to do. I just read and read and read. How incredible it was that Hawthorne wrote 'The Scarlet Letter' after having not written in four years! The dedication they had to their own talents blows me away.

"Would I say that Hawthorne was a better writer than F. Scott Fitzgerald from the 20th century? I don't know. 'The Scarlet Letter' vs. 'The Great Gatsby'? It's hard to say.