As noted in the Illustrated Map of America’s Worst Utopias, the experimental society of Fruitlands was founded at Harvard, Massachusetts, in June 1843 by English Transcendentalist and reformer Charles Lane and Bronson Alcott, father of Little Women writer Louisa May Alcott. It lasted seven months. The author was 10 when her family moved from Concord to the little farmhouse to live by Bronson and Charles’s ascetic ideals. She would later give the society the name “Apple Slump” in her comic tale Transcendental Wild Oats (1873), which scholar Elaine Showalter calls “her keenest and…
