The Blithedale Romance (1852) is the third major romance of Nathaniel Hawthorne. 、In the novel's preface, Hawthorne describes his memories of this temporary home as "essentially a daydream, and yet a fact" which he employs as "an available foothold between fiction and reality." The story takes place primarily in the utopian community of Blithedale, presumably in the mid-1800s.