THREE ROADS BACK

Illuminating stories of how three of America’s most celebrated authors charted pathways to healing.

In this brief but remarkably rich study, Richardson (1934-2020) explores how three giants of American thought—Emerson, Thoreau, and William James—struggled with and found vital ways of transcending the grief brought on by losing a loved one. The author, who has written celebrated full-length biographies of each of the figures, provides what he terms a “documentary biography,” deftly guiding readers through copious quotations drawn from his subjects’ letters and journals. Such an approach, he explains, seeks to “facilitate a personal, even sympathetic, connection—rather than a detached, critical, or judgmental connection—between the reader and the subject.” This aim is vividly realized in the book’s informed and deeply moving considerations of responses to loss. Memorably, we hear from Emerson on his revelatory visit to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, which provoked in him a salvific sense of “the wonder and power and interconnectedness of Nature” after the death of his young wife; Thoreau, who, in the aftermath of his brother’s death, documented his emerging understanding of natural processes of destruction and creation as ultimately life-affirming; and James, whose cherished cousin’s death finally provoked in him a hard-won awareness that the cultivation of self-discipline and self-government could be the vehicle for extraordinary personal resilience. With great sensitivity, Richardson explains the relationship between personal trauma and the philosophical insights that might be generated in its wake, and his restrained but clarifying commentary allows his subjects’ voices to compel our attention. The author expertly frames the emotional and intellectual lives of these three significant artistic figures and demonstrates the relevance, for anyone, of what they accomplished in their profound negotiations with loss.

A stirring and keenly perceptive examination of bereavement and recovery.