Nathaniel Hawthorne
Author
Language
English
Description
Hailed by Henry James as "the finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in the country", Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter reaches to our nation's historical and moral roots for the material of great tragedy. Set in an early New England colony, the novel shows the terrible impact a single, passionate act has on the lives of three members of the community: the defiant Hester Prynne; the fiery, tortured Reverend Dimmesdale; and the obsessed,...
Author
Language
English
Description
Colonel Pyncheon does well in denouncing Old Matthew: he founds a New England dynasty and builds a remarkable mansion; but on its opening day he is found dead, slaked in his own blood. By 1840, that dynasty is almost spent; amid the dust and decay of the Seven Gables, Clifford and Hepzibah believe in their own continued nobility as much as they believe in the mysterious curse still tracking the Pyncheons. After 30 years in prison for a murder he did...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Abjuring the city for a pastoral life, a group of utopians set out to reform a dissipated America. But the group is a powerful mix of competing ambitions and its idealism finds little satisfaction in farmwork. Instead, of changing the world, the members of the Blithedale community individually pursue egotistical paths that ultimately lead to tragedy. Hawthorne's tale both mourns and satirizes a rural idyll not unlike that of nineteenth-century America...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
A mysterious minister who never removes the black veil shrouding his face, an eccentric scientist who experiments with the fate of his friends, a cheerful tombstone carver who speaks the wisdom of the graveyard, these are but a few of the unusual New Englanders you'll meet in Twice-Told Tales.
Author
Publisher
Project Gutenberg
Language
English
Description
Selections of short stories from the second edition of the short story collection Mosses from an Old Manse published in 1854. The stories were originally published from 1832 - 1854. Stories include: The Birthmark -- Young Goodman Brown -- Rappaccini's Daughter -- Mrs. Bullfrog -- The Celestial Railroad -- The Procession of Life -- Feathertop: A Moralized Legend --Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent -- Drowne's Wooden Image -- Roger Malvin's Burial -- The...
Author
Series
Publisher
Dover Publications
Pub. Date
1992.
Language
English
Description
Nathaniel Hawthorne's works are staples in the canon of American literature. The author drew upon the early Puritan influences that played a major role in the country's history and exploited them through mystery, creativity, science, and witchcraft. Hawthorne wrote with a psychological view of his characters and their motivations, allowing him to craft characters, plots, and scenes that truly represent his story's themes. His use of foreshadowing...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Rappaccini's Daughter" is a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne first published in the December 1844 issue of The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, and later in the 1846 collection Mosses from an Old Manse. It is about Giacomo Rappaccini, a medical researcher in medieval Padua who grows a garden of poisonous plants. He brings up his daughter to tend the plants, and she becomes resistant to the poisons, but in the process she herself becomes...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
In this short story, Hawthorne sets the scene in a rural valley located in an unnamed U.S. state that resembles New Hampshire. A rock formation in a nearby notch is imagined, by many locals and visitors, to resemble the shape and features of a human face. - From Wikipedia
10) The marble faun
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"The fragility - and the durability - of human life and art dominate this story of American expatriates in Italy in the mid-nineteenth century. Befriended by Donatello, a young Italian with the classical grace of the 'Marble Faun', Miriam, Hilda, and Kenyon find their pursuit of art taking a sinister turn as Miriam's unhappy past precipitates the present into tragedy." "Hawthorne's 'International Novel' dramatizes the confrontation of the Old World...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"The Great Stone Face" is a short story published by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1850. The story reappeared in a full-length book, The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales, published by Ticknor, Reed & Fields in 1852. It has since been republished and anthologized many times. Hawthorne sets the scene in a rural valley located in an unnamed U.S. state that resembles New Hampshire. A rock formation in a nearby notch is imagined, by many locals and visitors,...
Author
Language
English
Description
There is hardly a more difficult exercise of fancy than, while gazing at a figure of melancholy age, to recreate its youth, and without entirely obliterating the identity of form and features to restore those graces which Time has snatched away. Some old people—especially women—so age-worn and woeful are they, seem never to have been young and gay.
Author
Language
English
Description
In my walks through the burial-ground of Edgartown- where the dead have lain so long that the soil, once enriched by their decay, has returned to its original barrenness -in that ancient burial-ground I noticed much variety of monumental sculpture. The elder stones, dated a century back or more, have borders elaborately carved with flowers and are adorned with a multiplicity of death's- heads, crossbones, scythes, hour-glasses, and other lugubrious...
Author
Language
English
Description
In this vignette, first published in The Token (1831) when Hawthorne was twenty-seven years old, the narrator describes the places and people that he sees atop the steeple of an urban church: the countryside, the stately mansions, the busy wharf, the solitary young man, the two young ladies he encounters, and their father the prosperous merchant. The sun-filled clouds, with which his description begins, are soon succeeded by darker cousins, a thunderstorm,...
Author
Language
English
Description
First published anonymously (“by a Pedestrian”) in New-England Magazine, IX (November and December 1835), These four fragments were originally part of Hawthorne’s first grand conception The Story Teller in which the stories of the eponymous hero—a young vagabond named Oberon—would be told within the context of a series of American scenes.