 Margaret Fuller was the daughter of a Massachusetts congressman who provided tutors for her in Latin, Greek, chemistry, philosophy and, later, German. Exercising what Barbara Packer calls “her peculiar powers of intrusion and caress” (P, 443), Fuller became friends with many of the transcendentalists, including Emerson. In the winters of 1839–44, Fuller organized a series of popular and influential “conversations” for women in Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore in Boston. She journeyed to the Midwest in the summer of 1843, and published her observations as Summer on the Lakes the following year. After this publishing success, Horace Greeley, a friend of Emerson’s and the editor of the New York Tribune, invited her to New York to write for the Tribune. Fuller abandoned her previously ornate and pretentious style, issuing pithy reviews and forthright criticisms: for example, of Longfellow’s poetry and Carlyle’s attraction to brutality. Fuller was in Europe from 1846–9, sending back hundreds of pages for the Tribune. On her return to America with her husband and son, she drowned in a hurricane off the coast of Fire Island, New York.