Nathaniel Hawthorne was a writer of novels and short stories who lived in
Concord, Massachusetts for significant portions of his life. He was introduced to
American Transcendentalism by
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and eventually married her sister Sophia. Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne,
Thomas T. Stone, and
Jones Very helped arrange a series of
Amos Bronson Alcott’s famous Conversations in Salem, Massachusetts in spring 1849. Transcendentalism generally appealed to Hawthorne and figured as an important factor in many of his works, but he also sensed a danger in the ramifications of the movement and tended to mock or criticize Transcendentalists and Transcendentalist issues. Hawthorne spent several months at Brook Farm in the early 1840s and wrote
The Blithedale Romance (1852) based on this experience.