Selected Short Stories Of Nathaniel Hawthorne

Featured stories include "The Wives of the Dead," concerning reactions to loss; "The Gray Champion," a tale of the supernatural; and "Wakefield," in which a runaway husband can't quite let go.

Presents a selection of fifteen short fiction stories by nineteenth-century American author Nathaniel Hawthorne.

"Selected Tales and Sketches" is a collection of the best short stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Collected here are the following tales: The Gray Champion, Sunday at Home, The Minister's Black Veil, The May-Pole of Merry Mount, Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe, Wakefield, The Prophetic Pictures, The Hollow of the Three Hills, Dr. Heidegger's Experiment, Legends of the Province-House: I.-Howe's Masquerade, II.-Edward Randolph's Portrait, III.-Lady Eleanore's Mantle, IV.-Old Esther Dudley, The Haunted Mind, The Ambitious Guest, Night Sketches, Endicott and the Red Cross, The Birth-mark, Young Goodman Brown, Rappaccini's Daughter, The Hall of Fantasy, The Celestial Rail-road, Feathertop: A Moralized Legend, Egotism; or, The Bosom-Serpent, The Christmas Banquet, Roger Malvin's Burial, Earth's Holocaust, Passages from a Relinquished Work, The Artist of the Beautiful, The Snow Image, The Great Stone Face, Ethan Brand, The Man of Adamant, The Wives of the Dead, My Kinsman, Major Molineux, Alice Doane's Appeal, Mrs. Hutchinson, Sir William Phips, and The Notch of the White Mountains.

Twenty-four of the best short stories by one of the early masters of the form, in the definitive collection edited by acclaimed scholar Newton Arvin. Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of the greatest American writers of the nineteenth century, and some of his most powerful work was in the form of fable-like tales that make rich use of allegory and symbolism. The dark beauty and moral force of his imagination are evident in such enduring masterpieces as "Young Goodman Brown," in which a young man who believes he has witnessed a satanic initiation can never see his pious neighbors the same way again; “Rappaccini's Daughter," about a lovely young girl who has been raised in isolation among dangerous poisons; and "The Birthmark," in which a scientist obsessed with perfection destroys the flaw that makes his otherwise flawless wife both beautiful and human.

The short fiction of a writer who helped to shape the course of American literature. With a determined commitment to the history of his native land, Nathaniel Hawthorne revealed, more incisively than any writer of his generation, the nature of a distinctly American consciousness. The pieces collected here deal with essentially American matters: the Puritan past, the Indians, the Revolution. But Hawthorne was highly - often wickedly - unorthodox in his account of life in early America, and his precisely constructed plots quickly engage the reader's imagination. Written in the 1820s, 30s, and 40s, these works are informed by themes that reappear in Hawthorne's longer works: The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance. And, as Michael J. Colacurcio points out in his excellent introduction, they are themes that are now deeply embedded in the American literary tradition.

Here are the best of Hawthorne's short stories. There are twenty-four of them -- not only the most familiar, but also many that are virtually unknown to the average reader. The selection was made by Professor Newton Arvin of Smith College, a recognized authority on Hawthorne and a distinguished literary critic as well. His fine introduction admirably interprets Hawthorne's mind and art.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's writings go to the heart of what it is to be a human struggling through his or her years on earth.