This teaching edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Blithedale Romance" reprints the Century Edition of the novel and includes a generous selection of historical materials. The documents are organized into thematic units on social reform, ninteteeth-century American utopian communities, Brook Farm, and gender relations, and include relevant excerpts from letters, diaries, periodicals and literary works by Karl Marx, Robert Owen, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, Lousia May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, among others. Editorial features designed to help students read the novel in the light of the documents includes a general introduction providing historical and cultural background, a chronology of Hawthorne's life and times, an introduction to each thematic group of documents, headnotes, extensive annotations, a generous of illustrations, and a selected bibliography.