The award-winning author of The Peabody Sisters looks at the trailblazing life of Margaret Fuller: Thoreau?s editor, Emerson?s friend, daring war correspondent, and tragic heroine. From an early age, Margaret Fuller dazzled New England?s intelligent elite. Her famous Conversations changed women?s sense of how they could think and live; her editorship of the Dial shaped American Romanticism. Now, Megan Marshall, whose acclaimed The Peabody Sisters ?discovered? three fascinating women, has done it again: no biography of Fuller has made her ideas so alive or her life so moving. Marshall tells the story of how Fuller, tired of Boston, accepted Horace Greeley?s offer to be the New York Tribune?s front-page columnist. The move unleashed a crusading concern for the urban poor and the plight of prostitutes, and a hunger for passionate experience. In Italy as a foreign correspondent, Fuller took a secret lover; wrote dispatches on the brutal 1849 Siege of Rome; and gave birth to a son. When all three died in a shipwreck off Fire Island shortly after Fuller?s 40th birthday, the sense and passion of her life?s work were eclipsed by tragedy and scandal. Marshall?s inspired account brings an American heroine back to indelible life.