. and other matters entirely upon the surface,” he insisted, “hide the man instead of displaying him.” Anyone at all curious to learn anything “essential” about him “must make quite another sort of inquest, and look through the whole range of his [imagined] characters, good and evil.”

Those who did seek him there often found the view disturbing. When his son, Julian, grew old enough to read the tales, he could not recognize in them the man he had known as his father. Even Hawthorne himself sometimes found that persona strange. Looking over the tales he had chosen for one of his collections, he told his publisher, “My past self is not very much to my taste, as I see it in this book.” He must have known at the time, he supposed, what the tales were intended to mean; but reading them now, through the outward-looking eyes of the “man of society,” he could neither recall what that was nor recover it from the words on the printed page.

Two styles—one transparently circumstantial, the other enigmatically portentous—bespeaking two Hawthornes, the first a popular journalist, the second a withdrawn poet: in the light of this duality, his whole career can be traced, from Fanshawe, his first known publication, to Our Old Home, the last of his writings he saw in print, and the excerpts from an unfinished, unfinishable work that appeared under the title “Scenes from ‘The Dolliver Romance,’ ” shortly after his death. When the career is surveyed in these terms, a number of critical issues come into somewhat clearer focus: his reasons for suppressing Fanshawe; the differences among the one hundred or so short pieces he published in periodicals between 1830, when he took up that form, and 1852, when he abandoned it; the unmatched power of The Scarlet Letter; the dissipation of that force in the romances he published thereafter; the abrupt change in his notebooks and journals, beginning around 1850; and his inability to finish another romance after The Marble Faun, even as he went on publishing successful journalism.

Then, too, when read in this light, and in the order of their publication, his writings tell a coherent, memorable story, instead of merely huddling together under two covers, the way selections for anthologies like this one are apt to do. It is a classic sort of tale, with a rising action, a resounding climax, a falling action, and a conclusion “of intermingled gloom and brightness.” As in so many of his own stories, the main character here is an artist possessed of magical powers and given to rash undertakings that lead to ambiguous conclusions.

Just where this story begins is somewhat unclear. When Hawthorne was seventeen and away at school, he asked his mother in a letter what she would say to his becoming a writer. The earliest evidence we have of his actually being one, however, appeared three years after his graduation from Bowdoin college, with the publication of Fanshawe, which he may have begun there. In any case, he had the novel printed anonymously, at his own expense, and then withdrew it almost immediately, never to mention it again. Even his wife learned of it only after his death.

Why he repudiated this story can only be guessed, but it seems that the literal, if somewhat affected, style of the narrative will not get at a subject that keeps cropping up along the way, only to be dismissed each time: the consequences, good as well as bad, that might result from a beautiful young woman’s fall from virtue. This devilish theme, it appears, could be handled only with emblematic tongs.

For the next couple of decades, Hawthorne divided his considerable energies between hack writing (including a half-dozen books for children) and the production of short pieces for annual gift books, monthly magazines, and newspapers. These short pieces fall into three more or less distinct categories. There are “sketches,” like “My Visit to Niagara” and “The Old Apple-Dealer,” snapshots of picturesque scenes and characters rendered in his “photographic” style and tinted with conscious “artistry.” Then there are “allegories” like “The Celestial Railroad” and “Earth’s Holocaust,” moral lessons hiding in plain sight behind fictional stage settings. Last come Hawthorne’s “tales,” imagined stories like “Young Goodman Brown” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” involving fictive characters in emblematic situations and told entirely in the secretive, poetic style. While the sketches mean little if anything more than they say outright, and the allegories put fiction at the service of meanings statable in their own terms, the tales strive, through fictive actions, with uncertain success, to uncover the meanings buried within them.

The tales led Hawthorne straight to The Scarlet Letter, his only novel written, as they are, entirely in his poetic style. Virtually every word in the story of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale comes bearing another meaning, one that generations of readers have tried to capture in literal terms, but that has finally defeated every attempt to detach it from the figures that seem its only adequate means of expression. When all is said and done, perhaps the only way to say all that The Scarlet Letter does is to recite it verbatim. Hawthorne remembered doing just that, right after finishing the story. “I read the last scene to my wife,” he recalled some years later, “—tried to read it, rather, for my voice swelled and heaved, as if I were tossed up and down on an ocean, as it subsided after a storm. . . . I think I have never overcome my adamant in any other instance.”

Whatever meaning Hawthorne may have drawn from that reading—and conveyed to Sophia, who went straight to bed, he was pleased to note, with a sick headache—he never wrote another story like it. To avoid any risk of doing so, he wrote only one more tale, “Feathertop,” which is really an allegorical caricature of the man he blamed for his dismissal from the Salem Custom House, and went back to writing romances in the formerly discarded manner of Fanshawe: stories about the (managed) triumph of innocence over guilt; all of them employing essentially the same characters and beefed up to salable girth with larger and larger helpings of journalistic copy.

During the seven years he spent in Europe, between The Blithedale Romance and The Marble Faun, Hawthorne turned exclusively to writing a journal of his travels and sightseeing in England and on the Continent. He had always kept a notebook of ideas for stories, but now he took to writing long descriptive entries, volumes of them, all in an essayistic style as pure, in itself, as the poetic style of The Scarlet Letter. Upon his return to America, he tried writing fiction again in the long-dormant emblematic style of the tales but found himself unable to finish anything. Seemingly arbitrary and factitious, rather than necessary to the expression of the writer’s inchoate ideas, his emblems mean next to nothing—either to the reader or, apparently, to the writer.

Journalism, on the other hand, continued to flow from his pen with seeming ease. While revising sections of his English journals, first for serial publication, then together in the volume called Our Old Home, he recorded a visit to Washington, D.C., and the battlefields of Virginia for Atlantic Magazine. In steady decline since The Scarlet Letter, the poetic style was dead by 1862, as he himself would be less than two years later. Whether that cryptically eloquent language perished because Hawthorne’s health was failing or he wasted away because it had is not an altogether impudent question. It was, as he insisted, the “essential” part of himself—the part he lived entirely in words.

From the moment that Hawthorne began signing his works, each new publication made his name better known, increasing his fame as the basis for it expanded.