While he had written many short stories before, "Fanshawe" was Nathaniel Hawthorne's first attempt at writing a novel. The novel is based on his experiences at Bowdoin College in the early 1820s and Hawthorne published the novel himself anonymously in 1828. A commercial failure, Nathaniel Hawthorne's contempt for his first novel can be seen in his efforts to destroy every copy of it. All unsold copies were burned and later all copies that were sold...

The Portable Hawthorne includes writings from each major stage in the career of Nathaniel Hawthorne: a number of his most intriguing early tales, all of The Scarlet Letter, excerpts from his three subsequently published romances—The House of Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun—as well as passages from his European journals and a sampling of his last, unfinished works. The editor’s...

One hundred years after inheriting a seven-gabled house with a dark and cursed past, Clifford and Hepzibah are old and nearly destitute. Descendants of the cursed Colonel Pyncheon, they have resorted to taking in boarders and running a struggling cent store to support themselves. When a distant relative, untouched by Colonel Pyncheon's curse, moves into the gabled house and takes over the cent store, her charm and disposition brings success to the...

Though written in the 1850s, 'The Scarlet Letter' is a story fit for our modern times, with its exploration of female independence in a restrictive society where the concept of sin is used as a repressive instrument of control, particularly of women. A clear inspiration for Margaret Atwood's dystopian powerhouse, 'The Handmaid's Tale,' Hawthorne artfully highlights the hypocricy of Hester Prynne's humiliation, and charts her struggle to assert her...