Robert Gross

Robert A. Gross is James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut. His first book, The Minutemen and Their World  (1976), presents a community study of the coming of the American Revolution in Concord, Massachusetts, site of “the shot heard ‘round the world.” Recipient of the 1977 Bancroft Prize, Minutemen was reissued in a revised and expanded edition (2022) by Picador Books.

Professor Gross’s latest book is The Transcendentalists and Their World, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. A cultural study of major American writers and a deep social biography of a place and an idea, the book traces the impact of capitalism, democracy, and social reform on nineteenth-century Concord, and it explores, in turn, the influence of these changes on the ideas of Emerson and Thoreau.

About the Expanding Circles Workshop