- Nature
- An Oration Delivered Before the Phi Beta Kappa Society
- Walden; Or, Life in the Woods
- Leaves of Grass
- Aesthetic Papers
- Woman in the Nineteenth Century
- Passage to India
- Democratic Vistas
- Brook Farm: Historic and Personal Memoirs
- Years of Experience: An Autobiographical Narrative
- The Blithedale Romance
- Record of Conversations on the Gospels, Held in Mr. Alcott's School
The most famous—and least likely—participant in the Brook Farm experiment was Nathaniel Hawthorne, who spent a year there shoveling manure and working in the fields. Hawthorne's biographers have never been able to decide what led him to join his reclusive and conservative temperament to this wild utopian scheme. Ten years later he used the experience, which he called in the preface "the most romantic episode in his own life," as the occasion for The Blithedale Romance. Near the beginning we learn that the communicants at Blithedale "had left the rusty iron frame-work of society behind us, for the sake of showing mankind the example of a life governed by...familiar love," rather than "the false and cruel principles on which human society has all along been based." On the other hand, the story his narrator, Miles Coverdale, tells of doomed reformers, betrayed sisterhood, inherited fortune (and misfortune), and "Arcadian affectation" is an ironic valedictory to the possibility of a new heaven and a new earth. "As regards human progress," Coverdale writes in the last chapter, "let them believe in it who can, and aid in it who choose!"