Franklin Benjamin Sanborn is best remembered today as a memorialist of New England Transcendentalism, devoted to preserving the memory and documents of the Concord writers in a post-Civil War "age of realism" and continental expansion. As a schoolteacher, antislavery advocate, journalist, editor, reviewer, social reformer, and pioneer in making social science a profession, Sanborn demonstrated Ralph Waldo Emerson's insistence that action and idealism were reciprocal movements. However broad his range of activism, Sanborn maintained a kind of instinctive loyalty to his adopted hometown of Concord, and that fidelity produced both his best and his most flawed works, his recollections of Concord writers and his editions of the works of Henry David Thoreau.

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn was born 15 December 1831 in the small, rural town of Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, to Aaron and Lydia Leavitt Sanborn. He was one of seven children, one of whom died in infancy; the others...