Hawthorne, Brook Farm, and The Blithedale Romance: Book Talk with Prof. Samuel Coale on April 6

Sunday, April 6, 2014  –  4:00 PM
Theodore Parker Unitarian Universalist Church
1859 Centre Street, West Roxbury MA 02132

Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of American’s greatest authors of the 19th century, was a founding member and shareholder of the Brook Farm Agricultural & Educational Institute and lived there (on and off) from April until November 1841.

Hawthorne’s novel The Blithedale Romance, written in 1852, is a thinly disguised send-up of his time at Brook Farm.

On April 6, Professor Sam Coale of Wheaton College will give a talk on the novel, which he describes as “a weird, strange, fascinating yarn.” Prof. Coale is an internationally recognized Hawthorne scholar with many other interests ranging from quantum theory to “Conspiracy and Paranoia in Contemporary American Politics and Fiction.” Among his works on Hawthorne are The Entanglements of Nathaniel Hawthorne (2011) covering the critical and biographical responses and approaches to the author and his works from the 1840s to contemporary times; and Mesmerism and Hawthorne: Mediums of American Romance (1998). He has lectured and taught all over the world on a mind-boggling range of topics, reviews books for The Providence Journal, and reviews plays and films.

Please join New Brook Farm in reading The Blithedale Romance this winter and spring. Copies are available in several Boston Public Library branches. Amazon offers many editions in hardcover, paperback and Kindle (including one that’s free).

If you’d prefer an audiobook version, Librivox, a site with volunteer-read public-domain audiobooks, has a copy.

If you’re using an iPod, iPhone, or iPad, they have the book in two parts in a format that your device will recognize as a book (so it keeps your place). You can download those two files, add them to your iTunes library, and sync them to your device.

Part 1

Part 2

If you’re using a different MP3 player, Librivox has a zip file with each chapter as a separate MP3.