Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, and Fruitlands in Harvard, Massachusetts, were the two communities most closely associated with the Transcendentalists. Brook Farm was planned at Elizabeth Peabody's Foreign Library in Boston, where George and Sophia Ripley, Orestes Brownson, Theodore Parker, James Freeman Clarke, John Sullivan Dwight, and others gathered to talk about the reform of society. It was established by George Ripley in 1841 and continued until 1847. Residents lived a simple life, focused upon a balance between physical labor and individual self-culture. The community had a strong school and an active social life. Brook Farmers included the Ripleys, Nathaniel Hawthorne (who drew upon the experience in writing his Blithedale Romance, first published in 1852), George William Curtis, John Sullivan Dwight and his sister Marianne, Rebecca Codman, and Isaac Hecker. At its largest, in 1843, the Brook Farm community consisted of about one hundred people. Emerson and others of the Transcendentalists who chose not to join the community nevertheless supported the endeavor and were frequent visitors there. In his "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England," Emerson wrote of Brook Farm as a "noble and generous movement . . . an experiment in better living."
In 1844, the Brook Farm constitution was revised, and the Transcendental utopia became a Fourierist community. Charles Fourier (1772–1837) was a French socialist author and reformer whose "phalansteries" sprang up in America in the 1840s and 1850s. Fourier had developed a theory of labor freely chosen and enjoyed by communal members. The North American Phalanx in Red Bank, New Jersey, established in 1843 by Albert Brisbane (a disciple of Fourier), was the first Fourierist community in America. The periodical The Harbinger was published at Brook Farm after its conversion to Fourierism
