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=                        Summer_on_the_Lakes                         =
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                            Introduction
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'Summer on the Lakes, in 1843' is a nonfiction book by American writer
and transcendentalist Margaret Fuller based on her experiences
traveling to the Great Lakes region.


                             Background
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Margaret Fuller wrote the book based on her travel journals while
visiting the Great Lakes region and places like  Chicago, Milwaukee,
Niagara Falls, and Buffalo, New York. Along the way, she interacted
with several Native Americans, including members of the Ottawa and the
Chippewa tribes, which she considered anthropologically in the book
and, ultimately, presented as people in need of sympathy. During her
trip, she was accompanied by Caroline Sturgis Tappan, a close friend
and confidante who also was a catalyst to many of Fuller's ideas about
art, women, and mysticism.

The genre of the book is difficult to classify. Scholar Dorothy Z.
Baker noted that the book has been variously defined as
"Transcendental travelogue, a sketchbook, and a social and political
tract".


                  Publication history and response
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Fuller began working on the book upon her return to New England. She
completed the manuscript on her 34th birthday in 1844.
In preparing the book, she did further research on the region at the
library at Harvard College; she is believed to be the first woman
allowed to use Harvard's library.

The book was published in May 1844 by Little & Brown; it went into
three printings in Fuller's lifetime. Critic Evert Augustus Duyckinck
called it "the only genuine book, I can think of, this season." Some
critics, however, disliked the lack of coherence in the book. Critic
Caleb Stetson in the 'Christian Examiner' wrote that the book was made
up of "things connected by no apparent link of association with the
objects which seem to fill her eye and mind... except for the fact
that they occurred in the course of her reading or were called up from
the depths by some mysterious association".

An abridged version edited by her brother Arthur Buckminster Fuller
was published posthumously in 1856 in a collection titled 'At Home and
Abroad; or, Things and Thoughts in America and Europe'.


License
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Original Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_on_the_Lakes