Building on the writings of German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who was the first to define a specific process of reasoning as "transcendental," a group of 19th century American authors -- mainly from the Boston and Concord, MA, area -- defined what was to become a (to many even: the) seminal school of American philosophical and political thought; built on a new awareness of nature on the one hand, and notions of nonviolence, equal rights (including the abolition of slavery) and the individual's self-reliance on the other hand. While arguably the movement's most prominent figures were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Amos Bronson Alcott (the father of Louisa May Alcott), Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, transcendentalist thought actually reached far beyond their circle. Moreover, a number of writers who didn't consider themselves transcendentalists as such, nevertheless were friendly with representatives of the movement and were, to a certain extent, influenced by transcendentalist philosophy (most prominently, Nathaniel Hawthorne -- who also lived in Concord, MA -- as well as poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and abolitionist Frederick Douglass).

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