Traversal by Popova, Maria

From the Marginalian creator and bestselling author Maria Popova, a bold exploration of what makes a meaningful life.

What is life?

What is death?

What makes a body a person?

What makes a planet a world?

In Traversal, Maria Popova illuminates our various instruments of reckoning with the bewilderment of being alive--our telescopes and our treatises, our postulates and our poems--through the intertwined lives, loves, and legacies of visionaries both celebrated and sidelined by history, people born into the margins of their time and place who lived to write the future: Mary Shelley, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Fanny Wright, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Marie Tharp, Alfred Wegener, Humphry Davy, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Woven throughout their stories are other threads--the first global scientific collaboration, the Irish potato famine, the decoding of the insulin molecule, the invention of the bicycle, how nature creates blue--to make the tapestry of meaning more elaborate yet clearer as the book advances, converging on the ultimate question of what makes life alive and worth living.

By turns epic and intimate--as concerned with the physical laws binding atoms into molecules as with the psychic forces binding us to one other--Traversal explores the universe between cells and souls to reveal the world, and our lives, in a dazzling new light.

Author: Maria Popova
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 02/17/2026
Pages: 608
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.80lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.35w x 2.02d
ISBN: 9780374616410

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 01/12/2026
Booklist 02/01/2026
Kirkus Reviews 01/01/2026

About the Author
Maria Popova is the creator of The Marginalian--a wide-ranging record of the search for meaning, founded in 2006 and included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. Her books and projects include Figuring, An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, and The Universe in Verse.