Volume 48, Number 13 · August 9, 2001
Hawthorne Down on the Farm
By John Updike
Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in the socialistic community of Brook Farm, in West Roxbury, eight or nine miles to the southwest of Boston, from April to November of 1841, with some weeks away in September. That so reclusive and skeptical a spirit might make his home in an idealistic farming commune seems in retrospect an unlikely hope; but he was thirty-seven, stalled in his writing career, newly quit of his job as a measurer of salt and coal at the Boston Custom House, engaged to Sophia Peabody, and casting about for a way to set up housekeeping and revive his literary efforts. His engagement was still a secret from his mother and two sisters in Salem; in the previous year, 1840, he had sat for the smolderingly handsome, faintly agitated portrait by Charles Osgood that still hangs in Salem's Peabody Essex Museum.
Feature, 3130 words
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