Margaret Fuller

Born in 1810 in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, Margaret Fuller became one of the most original writers and thinkers of her time. Closely connected with the Transcendentalists, she was a friend and collaborator of Ralph Waldo Emerson and served as the first editor of The Dial, the movement’s leading journal.

She wrote literary criticism, essays, and social commentary, and her best-known book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), is widely remembered as an early and powerful work of feminist thought. Fuller also worked as a journalist and foreign correspondent, reporting from Europe and writing about politics as well as culture.

Her life was cut short in 1850 when she died in a shipwreck off Fire Island, New York. Even with that brief life, her writing and public voice left a lasting mark on American literature, reform movements, and the history of women’s intellectual life.