Selected Tales and Sketches Read Online

Selected Tales and Sketches

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

The Hollow of the Three Hills

Sir William Phips

Mrs. Hutchinson

The Wives of the Dead

My Kinsman, Major Molineux

Roger Malvin’s Burial

Passages from a Relinquished Work

Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe

The Haunted Mind

Alice Doane’s Appeal

The Gray Champion

Young Goodman Brown

Wakefield

The Notch of the White Mountains

The Ambitious Guest

The May-Pole of Merry Mount

The Minister’s Black Veil - A PARABLE

Sunday at Home

The Man of Adamant - AN APOLOGUE

Endicott and the Red Cross

Night Sketches

Edward Randolph’s Portrait - FROM LEGENDS OF THE PROVINCE-HOUSE

The Hall of Fantasy

The Birth-mark

Egotism; or, The Bosom-Serpent - FROM THE UNPUBLISHED “ALLEGORIES OF THE HEART”

The Christmas Banquet - FROM THE UNPUBLISHED “ALLEGORIES OF THE HEART”

The Celestial Rail-road

Earth’s Holocaust

The Artist of the Beautiful

Rappaccini’s Daughter - FROM THE WRITINGS OF AUBÉPINE

Ethan Brand - A CHAPTER FROM AN ABORTIVE ROMANCE

Suggestions for Further Reading

HAWTHORNE: SELECTED TALES AND SKETCHES

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was born in Salem, Massachusetts, where, after his graduation from Bowdoin College in Maine, he wrote the bulk of his masterful tales of American colonial history, many of which were collected in his Twice-told Tales (1837). In 1839 and 1840 Hawthorne worked in the Boston Customs House, then spent most of 1841 at the experimental community of Brook Farm. After his marriage to Sophia Peabody, he settled in the “Old Manse” in Concord; there, between 1842 and 1845, he wrote most of the other tales in this volume, first gathered in a collection entitled Mosses from an Old Manse (1846). His career as a novelist began with The Scarlet Letter (1850), whose famous preface recalls his 1846-1849 service in “The Custom-House” of Salem. The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and The Blithedale Romance (1852) followed in rapid succession. After a third political appointment—this time as American Consul in Liverpool, England, from 1853 to 1857—Hawthorne’s life was marked by the publication of The Marble Faun (1860) but also by a sad inability to complete several more long romances. Ill health, apparently, and possibly some failure of literary faith finally eroded Hawthorne’s striking ability to make imaginative sense of America’s distinctive moral experience.

Michael J. Colacurcio is the author of The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne’s Early Tales and of various essays and reviews in the field of American literature. He has also edited and contributed to a volume of New Essays on The Scarlet Letter. He is currently Professor of English and American Studies at UCLA.

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First published in the United States of America by Penguin Books 1987
Published simultaneously in Canada

All rights reserved

The text of the stories in this collection is that established by the Centenary
Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne published by the Ohio State University
Center for Textual Studies and Ohio State University Press. The selections are
from the volumes entitled Twice-Told Tales, Mosses from an Old Manse, The Snow-Image
and Uncollected Tales, and Miscellany. Copyright © Ohio State University
Press, 1974, 1987. All rights reserved.

Acknowledgment is made to The Library of America for their assistance in the
production of this book.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864.
Selected tales and sketches.
(Penguin classics)
Bibliography: p.
I. Colacurcio, Michael J. II. Title.
PS1852.C’.3 86-21247

eISBN : 978-1-101-07780-1

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Introduction

When Hawthorne recollected, in the often quoted Preface to the third edition of his Twice-told Tales (1851), that he had once found himself “the obscurest man of letters in America,” he was speaking of a phase of his career that had long since lapsed. The Scarlet Letter (1850) had not yet had time to establish itself as the classic we now universally recognize—that miracle of meditation which transcends provincial origin and subject matter to become a standard of World Literature; but it was already a significant critical and popular success. The House of the Seven Gables ( 1851), which Hawthorne himself in some moods preferred to The Scarlet Letter, would further secure his reputation. And by the time The Blithedale Romance (1852) was making its way among reviewers and booksellers, a somewhat envious Herman Melville could write his recently estranged friend that “this name of ‘Hawthorne’ seems to be ubiquitous.”

But if these three extended fictions—the “American Romances,” as Henry James would name them in his critical biography of 1879—established Hawthorne in that rich and catholic world we treasure as “fiction in English,” and also at the center of an ongoing critical debate we recognize as “novel versus romance,” it remains true that those shorter fictions Hawthorne produced in the decades prior to 1850 amount to far more than a long foreground to worldly success. Indeed the total achievement of his earlier tales and sketches is so remarkable that Hawthorne would merit a place in the first rank of American authors even if he had written none of his longer works. Nor would the literature of any modern nation-state be anything but significantly enhanced if Nathaniel Hawthorne had happened to be born there and to have subjected its peculiar moral history to his unique style of fictional analysis.

Yet Hawthorne remains emphatically an American writer—self-consciously then and distinctively now. Most obviously: as no one escapes the pressures of history, so this notable descendant of the American Puritans could scarcely have eluded all trace of their conscientious and symbolic manner of taking the world. More significantly, his American-ness reveals itself in terms he consciously learned, by immersing himself, at the outset of his career, in the whole sequence of colonial and provincial texts which inevitably express the Puritan Mind and arguably control American Identity.

That is to say, Hawthorne did not merely inherit his status or assume his function as an “American” author; rather, he studied to recreate and meditated to judge the special quality of moral experience in his native land.