Anna Quincy Thaxter contributed to
Amos Bronson Alcott’s first attempts as a traveling conversationalist and missionary of human culture in September 1838, when she and
Charles T. Brooks formed a group for a series a Conversations with Alcott in Hingham, Massachusetts. Like
Rhoda Newcomb, she was a highly intelligent woman who perceived Alcott’s greatness and was important as a defender and supporter of the man
Ralph Waldo Emerson had called the “highest genius of the time.” When others had abandoned Alcott, making him “an idler in the midst of an age which cheats itself of my gifts,” she gave him not only encouragement but money at a time when he was desperately in need of it.