Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community

Without Sin chronicles the rise and fall of nineteenth-century America’s most succesful experiment in Utopian living: New York’s Oneida Community (1848-1880). Founded by the charismatic Christian Perfectioniost John Humphrey Noyes, this remarkable society flourished for more than thirty years as a unique world where property was shared, men and women were equals, sex was free and open, work was to be joyous, and pleasure was felt to be ＂the very business that God set Adam and Eve about.＂

Spencer Klaw has written for Esquire, Harper’s, American Heritage, and The New York Times Magazine, among other magazines and journals. He is the author of The New Brahmins: Scientific Life in America and The Great American Medicine Show. He lives in Connecticut with his wife, Barbara.