author
John Thomas Codman
Remembered both as a pioneering American dentist and as the author of a vivid firsthand account of Brook Farm, this 19th-century writer brought personal experience to one of the best-known utopian communities in U.S. history. His work blends memoir, social history, and an insider's view of a bold reform experiment.
1 Audiobook
Brook Farm: Historic and Personal Memoirs
by John Thomas Codman
About the author
Born on October 30, 1826, John Thomas Codman was an American dentist and writer. He was educated at Brook Farm, the transcendentalist community in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, and is noted as the first person to receive the degree of Doctor of Dental Medicine.
Codman is best known to readers for Brook Farm: Historic and Personal Memoirs (1894). Because he had direct ties to the community, the book stands out as a personal and historical portrait of Brook Farm rather than a distant retelling.
He died on December 14, 1907. Today, his name is most closely linked with Brook Farm and with the unusual path that took him from an important early moment in dental education to writing about one of America's most famous utopian experiments.