ABSTRACT
Sarah Margaret Fuller was one of antebellum America's foremost intellectuals. She is best known as the author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, for her pioneering advocacy of women's rights and social reforms, and for her role in the Transcendentalist movement. She has been called America's first major woman author and journalist, as well as the most influential gender theorist of her time. By the age of 16, Fuller's remarkable intellect and forceful personality had garnered attention and, occasionally, criticism. Devoted to self-cultivation, Fuller studied literature, philosophy, and languages; by adulthood, she was fluent in Latin, Greek, French, Italian, and German. Horace Greeley, the renowned editor of the New York Tribune, hired Fuller in late 1844 as the paper's literary critic-making her, the first such columnist for any American newspaper. Fuller published decrying the treatment of Irish immigrants, American Indians, slaves, prostitutes, and the working poor; and condemning the underlying social conditions that oppressed these groups.
