Some Research

I've been able to go to the library and found the annotated bibliography to Brook Farm by Joel Myerson. For those of you who don't know, Brook Farm is the real-life community that Hawthorne depicted in The Blithedale Romance. I flipped through the actual book that Myerson wrote about Brook Farm, but it wasn't very good for what I had in mind. However, the annotated bibliography was a better source of information because it was broken down into the members, the visitors, the histories, etc. Under each of these criteria, Myerson gave the citations for where he found those information with some notes as to how helpful it was. This will help me in narrowing down the individuals at Brook Farm and getting direct quotes from them. More importantly, it has a listing of almost everything that Hawthorne wrote about his stay at Brook Farm.

My next move now is to track down all of the interesting sources that Myerson has about Hawthorne and other people of interest like Margaret Fuller. On the other hand, it'll probably help if I formulate a research question so that I know what I should be looking for. So I guess I should say that my next move is to formulate a research question and then go find all of those sources that pertain to my question.

About the research question, I was thinking of extending the thesis from my reading paper. The thesis was that Hawthorne's narrator wasn't completely forthright in his descriptions of events and people. I guess I want to research into whether other writers at the time used the same method in their writings. Nonetheless, this idea seems weak to me and it'll probably undergo a lot of changes and "revisions" as I proceed further with the research.

P.S.: If any of you want to look at the annotated bibliography to Brook Farm, hit me up in the comments below and I'll get the book to you.