Nathaniel Hawthorne

<p><span class="deck">Nathaniel was poor and sunk in his solitude; Sophia seemed a hopeless invalid, but a late-flower love gave them at last “a perfect Eden.”</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">At Brook Farm a handful of gentle Bostonians launched a noble but short-lived experiment in communal living.</span> </p>

<p><span class="deck"> The Literary Lights Were Always Bright at</span> </p>

<p><span class="deck">How a champagne picnic on Monument Mountain led to a profound revision of <span class="typestyle">Moby Dick</span> — and disenchantment</span></p>

<p><span class="deck"><em><span class="typestyle">Walden</span></em> is here, of course; but so too is Fanny Farmer’s first cookbook.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Had Thomas Morton raised his maypole anywhere but next door to the Pilgrims, history and legend probably would have no record of him, his town, or his “lascivious” revels.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck"> Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody managed to extend the boundaries that cramped the lives of nineteenth-century women. Elizabeth introduced the kindergarten movement to America, Mary developed a new philosophy of mothering that we now take for granted, and Sophia was liberated from invalidism by her passionate love for her husband.</span> </p>

<p><span class="deck">“Good fiction writers,” says the author, “write the kind of history that good historians can’t or don’t write.”</span></p>