The Blithedale Romance

Nathaniel Hawthorne spent seven disillusioning months at the Brook Farm commune shoveling manure and losing his investment, and then insisted this novel was not about it — convincing no one. A minor poet joins a farm of high-minded reformers and finds himself forever watching rather than living: a magnetic agitator, a woman who worships him, and a girl with a secret no one will name. The narrator'...