Selected Tales and Sketches (Penguin Classics)

by Michael Colacurcio (Introduction), Nathaniel Hawthorne (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1987

  $3.42

  A collection of short fiction from a writer who helped to shape the course of American literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne's Selected Tales and Sketches is introduced by Michael J. Colacurcio in Penguin Classics . 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. 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. Collected here are stories such as Young Goodman Brown , in which a young Puritan man is haunted by a vision of satanic rituals, gradually losing his faith; The Haunted Mind , which contemplates the surreal nature of dreams as a gateway to supernatural realms; Ethan Brand , an eerie meditation on the nature of sin; and The Minister's Black Veil , in which a small-town clergyman undergoes a frightening transformation. Written from the 1820s-to the 1850s, 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 introduction, they are themes that are now deeply embedded in the American literary tradition. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64) was born in Salem, Massachusetts. In 1825 he graduated from Bowdoin College, Maine, and returned to Salem determined to become a writer. He joined Brook Farm, a utopian experiment in communal living, before marrying in 1842. His writing had already secured some success with his Twice-Told Tales , but it was the publication of The Scarlet Letter in 1850 that brought him immediate recognition, followed a year later by The House of the Seven Gables . If you enjoyed Selected Tales and Sketches , you might like Edgar Allen Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings , also available in Penguin Classics .