Transcendental Utopias: Individual and Community at Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden

People living in the village of Concord, Mass., in the 1840s must have thought they were the center of the intellectual universe. Nearby, Emerson, Thoreau and Bronson Alcott wrote and gave talks on transcendentalism while Hawthorne composed his brooding novels. Early in his imaginative study, Francis mentions a central paradox--how to reconcile a sense of community with the exaltation of the individual as championed in Emerson's ""Self-Reliance."" Each of the three transcendental utopias was within a day's drive of Concord. Brook Farm, Hawthorne's home for six months and the setting for The Blithedale Romance, was near Boston; Fruitlands, Bronson Alcott's quirky commune (home to his young daughter, Louisa May, for 10 months), was 20 miles away at West Roxbury, Mass.; and Walden Pond was an easy walk from the village. For all their fame, they were short-lived experiments and none solved the individual-versus-community puzzle. Even Thoreau's attempt to reduce the community to one succumbed after a couple of years, when he decided he had other destinies to fulfill. The author carries his own duality; he is a novelist and an academic. But it is the latter identity that governs, making the book's probable audience historians and others interested in utopian endeavors. Photos not seen by PW. (Apr.)