Nathaniel Hawthorne: Parables, Fantasies, Fragments

Here for the first time Hawthorne’s mind-bending short parables, fantasies, and fragments have been collected by an eminent Hawthorne scholar, culled from the author’s massive notebooks. Nathaniel Hawthorne graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825 and returned home to Salem, Massachusetts. Over the next nearly twenty years, he mostly resided at the family home, with his mother and sisters, and worked on his writing in his second story bedroom-study. During that time, he kept a series of notebooks, now called the American Notebooks, which were an important source for some of the stories in his first two volumes—Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Mosses from an Old Manse (1845)—and even for some of the later novels. Mainly, however, the American Notebooks served as a writer’s repository where Hawthorne could let his imagination wander freely, without having to worry about being called unconventional, weird, depressive, or even mad.