ALCOTT, AMOS BRONSON (1799-1888), American edu cationalist and writer, was born of farming stock in Wolcott (Conn.), Nov. 29, 1799. Extrav agant pedlar, visionary school teacher, peripatetic philosopher, Bronson Alcott gives the lie to all theories of Yankee shrewd ness and thrift. "A venerable Don Quixote," as Carlyle termed him, "all bent on saving the world by a return to acorns and the golden age," he was ridiculed by the majority of his contempora ries, including Lowell in A Fable for Critics and some of the Trans cendentalists. But Emerson, al though recognizing his limitations, remained a staunch friend; and educators have long since adopted many of the theories of this "American Pestalozzi." His truth to his ideals seems to have in volved more suffering for his wife, Abigail May, and his four daughters than for himself. School after school had to be given up, in part because of the conservatism of his patrons, in part because of harsh criticism such as that of Harriet Martineau, and in part because of too rigid adherence to his principles, as when he refused to dismiss the little negro girl who disrupted his Boston group. Indeed, Alcott was too visionary even to be a satisfactory day-labourer. In later life his western lecturing trips were made pleasant and financially profitable through his "riding in Louisa's chariot" and being known as the "grandfather of Little lV omen"; and his long-cherished dream of presiding over a Concord Summer School of Philosophy and Literature was fulfilled. He had early received some recognition in England. He died on March 4, 1888, just before his celebrated daughter.
Since in Alcott's lifetime his writings were recognizably inferior to his informal lectures or "conversations," it is natural that few should sear,.h to-day for the vignettes of contemporaries and the nuggets of wisdom scattered through his "Orphic Sayings" in the Dial, his Tablets (1868), Concord Days (1872) and Table Talk (1877). The poem New Connecticut (1887) and some of the Sonnets and Canzonets (1882) are of autobiographic value ; and his Observations on the Principles and Methods of Infant Instruction (1830), together with Elizabeth Peabody's transcripts of his classroom procedure in Record of a School (1835), etc., reveal his educational innovations. A. Bron son Alcott: His Life and Philosophy (1893) , by F. B. Sanborn and W. T. Harris, draws largely upon diaries, and Bronson Alcott's Fruitlands (1915) , an interesting compilation by Clara E. Sears, illuminates his unfortunate experiment in Communistic plain living and high thinking. See also Honore W. Morrow, The Father of Little Women (1927).