Congratulations to Megan Marshall for winning the coveted 2014 Pulitzer Prize for her wonderful biography, Margaret Fuller, A New American Life. When the prizes were announced on April 14th those of us who study the suffrage movement were delighted to see such a wonderful accolade for a “a richly researched book that tells the remarkable story of a 19th century author, journalist, critic and pioneering advocate of women’s rights.”

Margaret Fuller was a member of the New England intellectual elite, friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Horace Greeley. She was an accomplished writer, becoming the editor of the transcendentalist journal, The Dial in 1840 and also writing for the New York Tribune under Horace Greeley in 1844. Margaret was an early champion of the poor and disadvantaged, and stressed the importance of education for women. She was the author of Women in the Nineteenth Century. In 1846, acting as an American correspondent for Horace Greeley, she sailed for Italy where she entered  into a relationship and had a son with Giovanni Ossoli. The small family was on its way home to the United States when the ship floundered and sunk off the coast of Fire Island in 1850. Margaret’s body was never found.

For more about this remarkable woman, please click on the link on the left, “Margaret Fuller’s Life” to fine a wonderful website that continues the story.

Margaret Fuller, A New American Life was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston – New York, 2013.