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Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tales & Sketches

Edited by Roy Harvey Pearce

“He was a Gothic romancer, a child of the European literary age, whose subject matter, in many of his best works, was quintessentially American—the rock-hewn theocracy of Puritan New England a century and a half before his time.”— Newsday

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Table of Contents

Overview
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This Library of America volume offers what no reader has ever been able to find—an authoritative edition of all the tales and sketches of Nathaniel Hawthorne in a single comprehensive volume. Everything is included from his three books of stories, Twice-told Tales (1837, revised 1851), Mosses from an Old Manse (1846, 1854), The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-told Tales (1851) and from his two books of stories for children based on classical myths, A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys (1852) and Tanglewood Tales (1853)—along with sixteen stories not found in any of these volumes.

The stories are arranged, as they never have been in any other edition, in the order of their periodical publication. Readers of Hawthorne will thereby get a unique sense of how he became one of the most powerful and experimental writers of American fiction.

Here are many familiar but always surprising works like “Young Goodman Brown,” “Wakefield,” “The Birth-mark,” “The Artist of the Beautiful,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” and “Ethan Brand.” And here, too, are many others that deserve to be better known, like:
- “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” a suspenseful story of guilt and parricide;
- “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” where the chances for human love are perilously suspended between the silken license of the revelers and the iron rectitude of the Puritans;
- the masterly tale “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” full of the pains and terrors of national and familial separations, the severing of the ties of blood and culture that united the colonies to England;
- and the exquisite little story “The Wives of the Dead,” about the ambiguities of love and loss, in which, as so often in Hawthorne, the reader at the end is left in a kind of awe at the multiple possibilities of meaning.
To read these stories is to understand anew why Hawthorne is a great artist and an astonishingly contemporary one.

Roy Harvey Pearce, volume editor, is emeritus professor of American literature at the University of California at San Diego. He has published extensively on nineteenth-century American literature and intellectual history and served on the editorial board of the Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tales & Sketches is kept in print with a gift from Jonathan Arac and Susan Balée, made in honor of Sacvan Bercovitch and Max Rudin, to the Guardians of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

Tales and Sketches
The Hollow of the Three Hills
Mrs. Hutchinson
An Old Woman’s Tale
Dr. Bullivant
Sights from a Steeple
The Haunted Quack
The Wives of the Dead
My Kinsman, Major Molineux
Roger Malvin’s Burial
The Gentle Boy
The Seven Vagabonds
The Canterbury Pilgrims
Sir William Pepperell
Passages from a Relinquished Work
Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe
The Haunted Mind
Alice Doane’s Appeal
The Village Uncle
Little Annie’s Ramble
The Gray Champion
My Visit to Niagara
Old News
Young Goodman Brown
Wakefield
The Ambitious Guest
A Rill from the Town-Pump
The White Old Maid
The Vision of the Fountain
The Devil in Manuscript
Sketches from Memory
The Wedding-Knell
The May-Pole of Merry Mount
The Minister’s Black Veil
Old Ticonderoga
A Visit to the Clerk of the Weather
Monsieur du Miroir
Mrs. Bullfrog
Sunday at Home
The Man of Adamant
David Swan
The Great Carbuncle
Fancy’s Show Box
The Prophetic Pictures
Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment
A Bell’s Biography
Fragments from the Journal of a Solitary Man
Edward Fane’s Rosebud
The Toll-Gatherer’s Day
Sylph Etherege
Peter Goldthwaite’s Treasure
Endicott and the Red Cross
Night Sketches
The Shaker Bridal
Foot-prints on the Sea-shore
Thomas Green Fessenden
Time’s Portraiture
Snow-flakes
The Threefold Destiny
Jonathan Cilley
Chippings with a Chisel
Legends of the Province-House
Howe’s Masquerade
Edward Randolph’s Portrait
Lady Eleanore’s Mantle
Old Esther Dudley
The Sister Years
The Lily’s Quest
John Inglefield’s Thanksgiving
A Virtuoso’s Collection
The Old Apple-Dealer
The Antique Ring
The Hall of Fantasy
The New Adam and Eve
The Birth-mark
Egotism; or, the Bosom-Serpent
The Procession of Life
The Celestial Rail-road
Buds and Bird-Voices
Little Daffydowndilly
Fire-Worship
The Christmas Banquet
A Good Man’s Miracle
The Intelligence Office
Earth’s Holocaust
The Artist of the Beautiful
Drowne’s Wooden Image
A Select Party
A Book of Autographs
Rappaccini’s Daughter
P.‘s Correspondence
Main-street
Ethan Brand
The Great Stone Face
The Snow-Image
Feathertop
Prefaces
To Mosses from an Old Manse
To Twice-told Tales
To The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-told Tales

A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys
Preface
Tanglewood Porch: Introductory to “The Gorgon’s Head”
The Gorgon’s Head
Tanglewood Porch: After the Story
Shadow Brook: Introductory to “The Golden Touch”
The Golden Touch
Shadow Brook: After the Story
Tanglewood Play-Room: Introductory to “The Paradise of Children”
The Paradise of Children
Tanglewood Play-Room: After the Story
Tanglewood Fireside: Introductory to “The Three Golden Apples”
The Three Golden Apples
Tanglewood Fireside: After the Story
The Hill-Side: Introductory to “The Miraculous Pitcher”
The Miraculous Pitcher
The Hill-Side: After the Story
Bald Summit: Introductory to “The Chimaera”
The Chimaera
Bald Summit: After the Story

Tanglewood Tales: For Girls and Boys Being a Second Wonder Book
The Wayside: Introductory
I. The Minotaur
II. The Pygmies
III. The Dragon’s Teeth
IV. Circe’s Palace
V. The Pomegranate-Seeds
VI. The Golden Fleece

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ISBN: 978-0-94045003-5 1493 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 2 Library of America Series

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