Born in Hinsdale, New Hampshire, Charles A. Dana grew up in western New York and learned business at an early age clerking at his uncle's store in Buffalo. In his spare time he studied Latin and Greek. He entered Harvard in September 1839, but his poor eyesight and tight finances prevented his completion of a degree. In September 1841 he joined the group at Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, a Utopian community established by Rev. George Ripley and other Transcendentalists as a testing ground for their ideas about cooperative, democratic living in an environment that encouraged intellectual growth. Other residents at Brook Farm included the novelists Nathaniel Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott; poet-essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson; literary critic Sarah Margaret Fuller, Marchesa D'Ossoli; and Unitarian minister William Henry Channing. In 1842 Dana also became acquainted with Horace Greeley, the legendary founder and editor of the New...