The Portable HawthorneIntroduction
Chronology
I. The Tales (1830-1852)
Editor's Note
My Kinsman, Mayor Molineux
Roger Malvin's Burial
Young Goodman Brown
The Minister's Black Veil
The Man of Adamant
The Birth-Mark
Rappaccini's Daughter
Prefaces
from "The Old Manse"
to Twice-told Tales
to The Snow-Image
II. The Scarlet Letter (1850)
Editor's Note
III. The Published Romances (1851-1860)
Editor's Note
from The House of the Seven Gables
from The Blithedale Romance
from The Marble Faun
IV. The European Journals (1853-1860)
Editor's Note
from the English, French, and Italian Journals
V. The Last Years (1861-1864)
Editor's Note
Passages from the letters and the Unfinished Romances
Suggestions for Further Reading
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804, in Salem,
Massachusetts, the son and grandson of proud New England seafarers.
He lived in genteel poverty with his widowed mother and two young
sisters in a house filled with Puritan ideals and family pride in a
prosperous past. His boyhood was, in most respects, pleasant and
normal. In 1825 he was graduated from Bowdoin College, Brunswick,
Maine, and he returned to Salem determined to become a writer of
short stories. For the next twelve years he was plagued with
unhappiness and self-doubts as he struggled to master his craft. He
finally secured some small measure of success with the publication
of his Twice-Told Tales (1837). His marriage to Sophia Peabody in
1842 was a happy one. The Scarlet Letter (1850), which brought him
immediate recognition, was followed by The House of the Seven
Gables (1851). After serving four years as the American Consul in
Liverpool, England, he traveled in Italy; he returned home to
Massachusetts in 1860. Depressed, weary of writing, and failing in
health, he died on May 19, 1864, at Plymouth, New Hampshire.
William C. Spengemann is the Hale Professor in Arts and Sciences
and Professor of English Emeritus at Dartmouth College. He edited
the Penguin Classics edition of Nineteenth-Century American Poetry.
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