In this short satirical piece, Alcott pokes fun at her father's philosophical ideas and their failed real-life application while showing the great burden they put upon her mother. This edition also includes some of the few surviving pages from the diary Alcott kept during the Fruitlands experiment in 1843 (she was 10-11) and two contemporary letters by Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane. ( )

When Louisa May Alcott was ten years old, her father and other transcendental visionaries experimented with living off the land in a community called Fruitlands. They would not use any animal products in diet, farming, or clothing. They would work at what jobs pleased them and spend their leisure time in activities such as reading or discussing philosophical questions.

In Transcendental Wild Oats, Louisa May Alcott fictionalizes her family's experience attempting just that. This very short story is subtitled "A Chapter from an Unwritten Romance." I do not know enough about Fruitlands to determine how realistic some of the situations are, but her descriptions sometimes made me laugh as Louisa shows how the principles may have been well and good, but in practice their experiment went awry. This volume also includes an excerpt from Louisa's childhood diary and two letters that Fruitlands founders Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane wrote. Perhaps this was not a good book to read as my introduction to Bronson Alcott and Fruitlands, but the story piqued my interest in reading a biography of Louisa May Alcott that gives me more information on this experiment. ( )