ORPHEUS AT THE PLOUGH.

On a cool day in June of 1843, in Concord, Massachusetts, Bronson Alcott loaded a horse-drawn wagon and set off with his family and several like-minded believers to establish a community called Fruitlands. They were to live on the fruits of the land fourteen miles away, in a cramped farmhouse that dated from Colonial times and was badly in need of renovation. Louisa May Alcott, then ten, rode beside her mother, Abigail, and her two younger sisters while Anna, the eldest daughter, trudged alongside. The wagon carried few agricultural supplies, but Alcott had found room for his bust of Socrates.

Alcott had examined, and judged inadequate, the various utopian experiments springing up throughout New England in reaction to the industrial age. He had scorned the most famous of the communes, Brook Farm, near Boston, because his fellow-transcendentalists allowed consumption of milk; Alcott believed that milk belonged to the calf, just as wool was the rightful property of the sheep. He expected the Fruitlanders to endure a New England winter clad only in linen tunics spun from flax plants. He eschewed cotton and sugar--products of slave labor. He intended that no beasts should be enslaved to the plow at Fruitlands; the fields would be tilled by spade alone and fertilized without the benefit of animal manures.

Alcott was esteemed by the leading intellectual lights of the day. Ralph Waldo Emerson called him "the most extraordinary man and highest genius of the time." To Henry David Thoreau, he was "the sanest man . . . of any I chance to know." Margaret Fuller hailed him as "a philosopher worthy of the palmy days of ancient Greece." Alcott's writings had fuelled Emerson's thought during the composition of his seminal essay "Nature." Alcott was also an influence for Thoreau's famous anti-slavery protest; he withheld tax and was arrested three years before Thoreau's similar actions led to the tract "Civil Disobedience." But Alcott was more than simply an inspiration to his intellectual neighbors. He was a founder of Boston's first white anti-slavery society; he sheltered runaway slaves and braved gunfire to protest the Fugitive Slave Act. As a teacher, he had been responsible for a radical and highly influential rethinking of education.

Yet, if Alcott is remembered at all, it is usually as the improvident loser whose daughter was the author of "Little Women" and who lived as a parasite on her earnings. None of Louisa May Alcott's twentieth-century biographers are kind to Bronson: at best, he is portrayed as hapless, at worst abusive. Martha Saxton's "Louisa May" is particularly severe. Saxton applies her nineteen-seventies feminist eye to the Victorian-era Alcotts and sees only dysfunction: Louisa is a browbeaten victim of a father who didn't love her; her literary life is a joyless enslavement brought about by the necessity of providing for her neglected mother and siblings. How did Bronson Alcott become such a belittled man?

Biographers have made much of the fact that the father in "Little Women" is largely absent, although the rest of the fictional Marches are closely based on Alcott family members. Louisa May thinly disguises herself as the tomboy writer, Jo. Her dutiful older sister, Anna, becomes Meg; Elizabeth is the doomed Beth; and May is the blond-curled artist, Amy. Abigail, the girls' capable, social-activist mother, is rendered recognizably as Marmee. But the father in the novel is down South--"away where the fighting was"--from the first page of the novel, and when he finally limps home from the Civil War, more than a hundred pages later, Louisa May sends him off to his library and more or less closes the door. To read Bronson Alcott's journals and letters is to understand her difficulty: the truth about her father's character was far too odd and unorthodox to be shoehorned into an idealized, moralistic tale for Victorian children. Bronson Alcott was even more original, courageous, and visionary than his more famous contemporaries: the most transcendent transcendentalist of them all.

Born Amos Bronson Alcox on November 29,1799, on a farm of a few rough acres in the thin-soiled Connecticut hamlet of Spindle Hill, near Wolcott, the radical educator received a rudimentary formal schooling. The one-room schoolhouse he attended was dirty, freezing in winter and stifling in summer, and so poorly equipped that pupils were obliged to make their own ink. The rod and the ferule were often employed.

Somehow, Amos Alcox already had a wider vision of learning; he and a cousin embarked on their own project of self-education, writing and critiquing each other's journals, which they made from scraps of paper crudely sewn together. Lacking access to a library, they scoured surrounding farms in quest of books to borrow. The one that made the deepest ...