Nathaniel Hawthorne

Hawthorne’s greatest romance, The Scarlet Letter, is often simplistically seen as a timeless tale of desire, sin, and redemption. In his introduction, Michael J. Colacurcio argues that The Scarlet Letter is a serious historical novel. If Hawthorne’s fiction rigorously and faithfully subjects Hester and Dimmesdale to the limits of seventeenth-century possibility, it nonetheless looks forward to the better, brighter world of Margaret Fuller and Fanny Fern, of Charles Fourier and John Humphrey Noyes. The John Harvard Library edition reproduces the authoritative text of The Scarlet Letter in the Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Much of the last few years of Hawthorne's life was given to working on versions of a last romance, set partly in England, which he never completed. This version was edited into publishable form by his son a few years after his death; while legitimate objections exist to Julian Hawthorne's edition, it is the version which has been known to readers and formed part of Hawthorne's oeuvre for most of its history.

The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne's first mature full-length novel, is his undisputed masterpiece. It is coupled here with The Blithedale Romance, based partly on Hawthorne's own experience of the communal experiment at Brook Farm.

This is a dramatic, moving depiction of social defiance and social deference, of passion and human frailty. Set in the harsh Puritan community of seventeenth-century Boston, this tale of an adulterous entanglement that results in an illegitimate birth reveals Nathaniel Hawthorne's concerns with the tension between the public and the private selves. Publicly disgraced and ostracized, Hester Prynne draws on her inner strength and certainty of spirit to emerge as the first true heroine of American fiction. Arthur Dimmesdale stands as a classic study of a self divided; trapped by the rules of society, he suppresses his passion and disavows his lover, Hester, and their daughter, Pearl.

Tremendously moving and rich in psychological insight, this tragic novel of sin and redemption addresses America's Puritan past. Depicting the struggle between mind and heart, Hawthorne has fashioned a masterpiece of American fiction. Revised reissue.

This volume contains the published selections from Hawthorne's journals during his family's tour of France, Italy and a part of Switzerland, including substantial observations on Italian and Roman art and architecture as well as the ways of life and culture he observed.

This volume contains various short prose pieces, both fiction and non-fiction, written by Hawthorne mostly for magazines or anthologies but not collected or republished within his lifetime, of which the most significant is the Life of Franklin Pierce.