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.