Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel "The Blithedale Romance" (1852) is based on his recent experience at the New England commune called Brook Farm, and he transforms this history into a witty and skeptical account (in turn) of the commune’s good intentions, exotic blossoms, and wild weeds. The novel is fascinating as history, psychology, and interpersonal drama. The least symbolic and most realistic of his works, the novel has what John Updike terms a “revolutionary engagement with current concerns,” especially with transcendentalism, both in its literal (socialist), and in its fantastic (spiritualist) variants. The narrator of the novel is a slightly satirized version of Hawthorne himself, in his detachment, pessimism, and eye for discerning latent motives and complicating factors in others and in himself.