Robert A. Gross is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of The Minutemen and Their World (1976), Books and Libraries in Thoreau’s Concord (1988), and coeditor, with Mary Kelley, of An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840 (2010). His book The Transcendentalists and Their World will be published in 2021.