Amos Bronson Alcott's formal education ended at age 13 and he decided to become a peddler in the south. In 1822 he stayed at a Quaker community where he realized he wanted to return to teaching. So in 1823 he taught at schools in New England and Pennsylvania. He began a school at Wolcott near his home in 1824 and taught at various schools in Connecticut until 1828. Alcott was invited by the Boston Infant School Society to take charge of their classroom and there he met Abba May, his soon to be wife. In 1830 there were married and a year later moved to the Philadelphia area where Amos taught at different schools. Their first daughter , Anna, was born in 1832 and Louisa May the next year. They moved back to Boston in 1834 .
Amos began a school at the Masonic Temple called the Temple School of Boston. There he used his educational philosophy which was inductive and Socratic to teach. When books on his ways of teaching were released such as Elizabeth Peabody's Record of a School and his own Conversations with Children on the Gospels, in 1835 and 1836, they were attacked by the press and public. People started taking their children out of the school and when all but two were left in 1839 he decided to close it down. The Alcott's now had three daughters , Elizabeth was born in 1836, so they moved to Concord in 1840 to support themselves by farming. There Amos renewed his friendship with Emerson and Thoreau and became a member of the Transcendental Club and became involved with The Dial, a Transcendentalist periodical, which was named after the heading Alcott had given a collection of thoughts taken from his journals. He published two things, Orphic Sayings in 1840 which got horrible reviews and a selection from his journals in 1842.
In 1843 the Alcott family and a man named Charles Lane started the Fruitlands community at Harvard , Massachusetts. This was an experiment to create a Utopia which didn't work and was abandoned in 1844. Over the next few years the Alcott family moved around to Boston, and Walpole, New Hampshire and went back to Concord in 1857. Amos had a job of superintendent of Concord's schools which didn't pay enough to live on. The family lived off of gift's from friends and what Mrs. Alcott and the kids earned from teaching, taking in work, or writing. In 1868 they finally came into money because Louisa May wrote Little Women and did very well. Amos did a bunch of " Conversations" or talks in the 1850's, that brought them money too. As the Transcendentalists died, he kept up the idea with lectures on the philosophy which developed into the Concord School of Philosophy in 1879. His wife Abba died in 1877 and in 1882 Amos had a stroke. He died six years later.
Works Cited
Fisher, Aileen and Olive Rabe. We Alcotts. New York : Atheneum, 1968.
Hart, James D. The Oxford Companion to American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.