Transcendentalist, journalist, pioneering feminist, public intellectual, war correspondent, poet—Margaret Fuller’s diverse and radical achievements in her short life are vividly captured in her brilliant and still surprising writings. This authoritative Library of America volume is the first new edition of her works in more than a generation and the most comprehensive ever published.

An account of Fuller’s travels to the prairies and Great Lakes, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (1844) is a sketchbook of poems, meditations, and commentary about emerging national issues, from the status of women on the frontier to the despoliation of the natural environment to the plight of displaced American Indian tribes. Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)—the most influential work on women’s rights since Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and a foundational document of American feminism—is a groundbreaking multigenre study of gender and gender fluidity so ahead of its time that Edgar Allan Poe was moved to write, “humanity can be divided into three classes: men, women, and Margaret Fuller.”

These major works are supplemented by a generous selection of Fuller’s journalism and other writings. Experimental fiction from The Dial and reviews of such writers as George Sand and Frederick Douglass join columns on contemporary social issues for the New-York Tribune and war reporting from the French siege of Rome in 1849. More than a dozen selections from Fuller’s unpublished writings, many previously known only to scholars, are newly transcribed from her manuscripts and journals. A selection of letters to such correspondents as Emerson, Thoreau, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others, includes three newly translated from the Italian.

Rounding out the volume are a chronology by Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Megan Marshall, a textual essay describing the sources for the works collected, helpful notes identifying Fuller’s many allusions and quotations, a general index, and an index of Fuller’s poetry.

Brigitte Bailey is Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of American Travel Literature, Gendered Aesthetics, and the Italian Tour, 1824–1862 (2018), co-editor of Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain (2012) and Margaret Fuller and Her Circles (2013), and former president of the Margaret Fuller Society.

Dr. Noelle A. Baker, an independent scholar, is editor of Stanton in Her Own Time (2016) and co-editor of The Almanacks of Mary Moody Emerson: A Scholarly Digital Edition (ongoing). She is editor in chief of the open-access, peer-reviewed journal Scholarly Editing and has served on the advisory board of the Margaret Fuller Transnational Archive and as an officer of the Margaret Fuller Society.

Megan Marshall is the Charles Wesley Emerson Professor at Emerson College. She is the author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Biography; The Peabody Sisters (2005) winner of the Francis Parkman Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart (2025). She is a past president of the Society of American Historians and has served on the board of the Margaret Fuller Society.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.