The Blithedale Romance: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism (Norton Critical Editions)

The text is that of the Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne produced at the Ohio State University Center for Textual Studies―a critical unmodernized reconstruction―to which the editors of this Norton Critical Edition have added extensive annotation.

The selection of "Backgrounds and Sources" focuses on Hawthorne's visit to Brook Farm in 1841, as reported in his letters and The American Notebooks, as well as on other experiences and observations which find expression in the novel.

The essays in "Criticism" include fifteen "Contemporary Reviews" that locate the problems of the novel pursued by later critics in a more detailed and sophisticated fashion.

"Modern Essays in Criticism" represent the perspec-tives of Irving Howe, Roy R. Male, A. N. Kaul, Leo B. Levy, Hans-Joachim Lang, Philip Rahv, Allan B. Lefcowitz, Barbara F. Lefcowitz, Nina Baym, Hyatt H. Waggoner, Frederick C. Crews, Kelley Griffith, Jr., Louis Auchincloss, James H. Justus, and Kent Bales.

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.

Seymour Gross was Burke OíNeill Professor of American Literature at the University of Detroit until his retirement in 1987. He is co-author of American Literature Survey and Images of the Negro in American Literature, editor of A "Benito Cereno" Handbook and the Norton Critical Edition of The House of the Seven Gables, and the co-editor of the Norton Critical Edition of The Scarlet Letter, Third Edition.


Rosalie Murphy is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Florida. She has taught at Sweet Briar College. She was the original editor of Contemporary Roots of the English Language.