Authors: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Michael J. Colacurcio
ISBN-13: 9780140390575, ISBN-10: 014039057X
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
Date Published: March 1987
Edition: Reprint
"Words -- so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them," Nathaniel Hawthorne once reflected. Hawthorne's own words indeed had an undeniable power. Author of The Scarlet Letter and originator of the American short story, Hawthorne left an indelible impression on literature that would influence his fellow writers into the next century.
The short fiction of a writer who helped to shape the course of American literature. With a determined commitment to the history of his native land, Nathaniel Hawthorne revealed, more incisively than any writer of his generation, the nature of a distinctly American consciousness. The pieces collected here deal with essentially American matters: the Puritan past, the Indians, the Revolution. But Hawthorne was highly - often wickedly - unorthodox in his account of life in early America, and his precisely constructed plots quickly engage the reader's imagination. Written in the 1820s, 30s, and 40s, these works are informed by themes that reappear in Hawthorne's longer works: The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance. And, as Michael J. Colacurcio points out in his excellent introduction, they are themes that are now deeply embedded in the American literary tradition.
Introduction | vii | |
A Note on the Text | xxxvii | |
The Hollow of the Three Hills (1830) | 1 | |
Sir William Phips (1830) | 7 | |
Mrs. Hutchinson (1830) | 14 | |
The Wives of the Dead (1832) | 22 | |
My Kinsman, Major Molineux (1832) | 29 | |
Roger Malvin's Burial (1832) | 51 | |
Passages from a Relinquished Work (1834) | 74 | |
Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe (1834) | 90 | |
The Haunted Mind (1835) | 104 | |
Alice Doane's Appeal (1835) | 110 | |
The Gray Champion (1835) | 124 | |
Young Goodman Brown (1835) | 133 | |
Wakefield (1835) | 149 | |
The Notch of the White Mountains (1835) | 159 | |
The Ambitious Guest (1835) | 162 | |
The May-Pole of Merry Mount (1836) | 172 | |
The Minister's Black Veil (1836) | 185 | |
Sunday at Home (1837) | 200 | |
The Man of Adamant (1837) | 208 | |
Endicott and the Red Cross (1838) | 217 | |
Night Sketches (1838) | 225 | |
Legends of the Province-House | 232 | |
The Hall of Fantasy (1843) | 246 | |
The Birth-mark (1843) | 259 | |
Egotism; or, The Bosom-Serpent (1843) | 279 | |
The Christmas Banquet (1844) | 295 | |
The Celestial Rail-road (1843) | 316 | |
Earth's Holocaust (1844) | 336 | |
The Artist of the Beautiful (1844) | 358 | |
Rappaccini's Daughter (1844) | 386 | |
Ethan Brand (1850) | 421 | |
Suggestions for Further Reading | 440 |