Brook Farm: Historic and Personal Memoirs

Brook Farm burns in 1846, but its flame still flickers in the American imagination. John Thomas Codman lived it, and in these pages he gives us something no historian can: the smell of thatch roofs, the weight of debts, the arguments over whether to plow on Sunday. Founded by former minister George Ripley in 1841, this Massachusetts commune attracted the era's most restless spirits, including a young Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose satiric novel "The Blithedale Romance" would later fictionalize (and savage) the experience. Codman doesn't mythologize. He shows the Transcendentalists wrestling with manure, the dream of cooperative labor colliding with human vanity, the slow financial hemorrhage that ended it all. This is history from inside the wound, written by a man who believed in the experiment and watched it fail. For anyone curious about the strange, persistent American urge to build heaven on earth and the predictable paradise that follows.