page_title: Margaret Fuller
section_title: New York Tribune
hierarchical_section_title: Margaret Fuller / Biography / New York Tribune
caption_attribution_description: Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1810-1850) a journalist, critic and women's rights activist.
context_page_description: Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli was an American journalist, editor, critic, translator, and women's rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalism movement. She was the first American female war correspondent, writing for Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune, and full-time book reviewer in journalism. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century is considered the first major feminist work in the United States.
  Born Sarah Margaret Fuller in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she was given a substantial early education by her father, Timothy Fuller, who died in 1835 due to cholera. She later had more formal schooling and became a teacher before, in 1839, she began overseeing her Conversations series: classes for women meant to compensate for their lack of access to higher education. She became the first editor of the transcendentalist journal The Dial in 1840, which was the year her writing career started to succeed, before joining the staff of the New York Tribune under Horace Greeley in 1844. By the time she was in her 30s, Fuller had earned a reputation as the best-read person in New England, male or female, and became the first woman allowed to use the library at Harvard College.
context_section_description: Fuller left The Dial in 1844 in part because of ill health but also because of her disappointment with the publication's dwindling subscription list. She moved to New York that autumn and joined Horace Greeley's New York Tribune as a literary critic, becoming the first full-time book reviewer in American journalism and, by 1846, the publication's first female editor. Her first article, a review of a collection of essays by Emerson, appeared in the December 1, 1844, issue. At this time, the Tribune had some 50,000 subscribers and Fuller earned $500 a year for her work. In addition to American books, she reviewed foreign literature, concerts, lectures, and art exhibits. During her four years with the publication, she published more than 250 columns, most signed with a "*" as a byline. In these columns, Fuller discussed topics ranging from art and literature to political and social issues such as the plight of slaves and women's rights. She also published poetry; her poems, styled after the work of Emerson, do not have the same intellectual vigor as her criticism.
  Around this time, she was also involved in a scandal involving fellow literary critic Edgar Allan Poe, who had been carrying on a public flirtation with the married poet Frances Sargent Osgood. Another poet, Elizabeth F. Ellet, had become enamored of Poe and jealous of Osgood and suggested the relationship between Poe and Osgood was more than an innocent flirtation. Osgood then sent Fuller and Anne Lynch Botta to Poe's cottage on her behalf to request that he return the personal letters she had sent him. Angered by their interference, Poe called them "Busy-bodies". A public scandal erupted and continued until Osgood's estranged husband Samuel Stillman Osgood stepped in and threatened to sue Ellet.
caption: Engraving of Margaret Fuller
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