By Kyle Gann
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott and Nathaniel Hawthorne - two of America's most distinguished essayists and two of its most enduring novelists - are all buried within several yards of each other in a section called "Author's Row" in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson and Alcott's father Amos Bronson Alcott were central figures in the Transcendentalist movement, a religious movement that prized the individual spiritual consciousness above scripture and dogma; Thoreau was a more peripheral figure, though…