Blithedale Romance Paperback by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Product Details

• Publisher: Belknap Press (2010-04-01)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 304 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780674050211
• Item Weight: 368.55 grams
• Dimensions: 0.0 x 0.0 x 0.0 cm

Henry James called The Blithedale Romance "the lightest, the brightest, the liveliest" of Hawthorne's novels and his character Zenobia “the nearest approach that Hawthorne . . . made to the complete creation of a person.”

Written in one of the most productive periods of his career, Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance was published in 1852, a year after The House of the Seven Gables and two years after his masterpiece The Scarlet Letter. With The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne writes fully in his own time, not haunting his characters with the American past. Drawn from his stay at Brook Farm, a communal experiment in living the pastoral life, the story is an engaging one that touches on many of the issues of his day, from brotherhood to women's rights and socialism. It remains a captivating work about politics, love, the supernatural, and idealism, written with Hawthorne’s sharp wit and deep intelligence.

About the Author

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE was four years old when his father, a sea captain, died in 1808. He grew up under the roof of his maternal uncles in Salem, Massachusetts, and attended Bowdoin College in Maine, where he discovered his vocation as a writer. The publication of his short story “Young Goodman Brown” in 1835 was followed by the collections Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Mosses from an Old Manse (1846). The latter took its name from the house in Concord, Massachusetts, where he and his wife, Sophia, lived after their marriage in 1842. Unable to earn a living from his writing, he sought employment as a government bureaucrat, first in the Salem Custom House and later as United States consul in Liverpool, England. Despite his chronic financial insecurity, he continued to produce such notable works as The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852), and The Marble Faun (1860). He died in Plymouth, New Hampshire, in 1864.

Arlin Turner (b. 1909 - d. 1980 ) was a scholar of American literature and instructor at Southwest Texas State University.