Blithedale Romance

One of Nathaniel Hawthorne's great romances, The Blithedale Romance draws upon the author's experiences at Brook Farm, the short-lived utopian community where Hawthorne spent much of 1841. Blithedale ("e;Happy Valley"e;), another would-be modern Arcadia, is the stage for Hawthorne's grimly comic tragedy (Henry James famously called the novel "e;the lightest, the brightest, the liveliest"e; of Hawthorne's "e;unhumorous fictions"e;). In his introduction, Robert S. Levine considers biographical and historical contexts and offers a fresh appreciation of the novel's ironic first-person narrator.The John Harvard Library edition reproduces the authoritative text of The Blithedale Romance in The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne.