collective settlements

One of Hawthorne's great romances, The Blithedale Romance draws upon the author's experiences at Brook Farm, the short-lived utopian community where Hawthorne spent much of 1841. Blithedale ("Happy Valley"), another would-be modern Arcadia, is the stage for Hawthorne's grimly comic tragedy (Henry James famously called the novel "the lightest, the brightest, the liveliest" of Hawthorne's "unhumorous fictions"). In his introduction, Robert S. Levine considers biographical and historical contexts and offers a fresh appreciation of the novel's ironic first-person narrator. The John Harvard Library edition reproduces the authoritative text to The Blithedale Romance in The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

A fifteen-year-old boy living in Icaria, Iowa, in 1875 finds himself in growing conflict with the socialistic principles of his community.

Explores the history of the Oneida community, as told by a descendant of one of the Community's original families, discussing it's founding in the early 19th century by religious leader John Humphrey Noyes and his followers who built a free love community in rural New York, their eventual rejection of Noyes' sexual theories and belief in eugenics after his death, and their business success as a leading manufacturer of flatware in the 20th century.

Shao Bin, a worker at the Harvest Fertilizer plant in a small Chinese factory town, sets off a storm of controversy when he composes a satirical cartoon criticizing his superiors for unfair practices and sends it to the provincial newspaper.

Oneida, a perfectionist communist community, as described by its members.

Ten-year-old Lydia describes her childhood escapades in pre-World War II Romania, her struggles to understand her parents' divorce amid the chaos of the war, and her life on a kibbutz in Palestine. Based on the life of the Israeli poet Arianna Haran.

Traces the history of collective settlements in the United States and compares their organization and purpose with the communes of today.

Feeling crowded and trapped in the farm commune where she has spent most of her life, fifteen-year-old Lake can find no hiding place from everything going wrong with the farm and with her parents.

Discusses experiments in communal life from early man to the present, exploring the philosophies and degrees of success of religious, pioneering, socialist, utopian, and contemporary communes.