Selected Tales and Sketches

Librarian Note: 31 Selections; Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780140390575

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.
–back cover

Hollow of the Three Hills
Sir William Phips
Mrs. Hutchinson
Wives of the Dead
My Kinsman, Major Molineux
Roger Malvin’s Burial
Passages from a Relinquished Work
Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe
Haunted Mind
Alice Doane’s Appeal
Gray Champion
Young Goodman Brown
Wakefield
Notch of the White Mountains
Ambitious Guest
May-Pole of Merry Mount
Minister’s Black Veil
Sunday at Home
Man of Adamant
Endicott and the Red Cross
Night Sketches
Legens of the Province-House
Hall of Fantasy
Birthmark
Egotism; or the Bosom-Serpent
Christmas Banquet
Celestial Railroad
Earth’s Holocaust
Artist of the Beautiful
Rappacini’s Daughter
Ethan Brand