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Encyclopedia entry: Brook Farm
- Article from:
- The Concise Oxford Companion to American Literature
- Author:
Copyright© The Concise Oxford Companion to American Literature 1986, originally published by Oxford University Press 1986. (Hide copyright information)
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Brook Farm,
cooperative community (1841–47) near West Roxbury, Mass., nine miles from Boston. Under George Ripley, the Transcendental Club established the community to apply its theories, forming a stock company under the name Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education. Among those interested in it were Hawthorne, Charles Dana, John S. Dwight, George W. Curtis, Theodore Parker, Orestes Brownson, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, C. P. Cranch, Bronson Alcott, W. E. Channing, and Emerson. Of these, only Hawthorne, who wrote about it in
The Blithedale Romance
, and Dana and Dwight lived there. Among the objectives were the promotion of the great ...