Christopher E. G Benfey

A surprising and scandalous story of how the interaction within a group of exceptional and uniquely talented characters shaped and changed American thought at the close of the Civil War. Benfey takes the seemingly arbitrary image of the hummingbird and traces its "route of evanescence" as it travels in circles to and from the creative wellsprings of the age: from the naturalist writings of abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson to the poems of his...