Nathaniel Hawthorne: Parables, Fantasies, Fragments Hardcover by Nathaniel Hawthorne / Edited with an introduction by Robert S. Levine

Product Details

• Publisher: Library of America (2026-10-27)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 247 pages
• ISBN-13: 9781598538601
• Item Weight: 328.86 grams
• Dimensions: 19.15 x 12.85 x 1.93 cm

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s haunting short parables, fantasies, and fragments gathered from his private notebooks for the first time.

After graduating from college in 1825, Nathaniel Hawthorne returned home to Salem, Massachusetts, where he lived with his mother and sisters for most of the next two decades, honing his craft in his third-story bedroom. During that time, he kept a series of journals, now called the American Notebooks, that became a vital taproot for his stories and novels. They also served as a laboratory where Hawthorne could experiment with fictional ideas and premises, letting his extraordinary imagination play with intriguing, sometimes wild possibilities. Some of his oddest, boldest, and most secretive writing—virtually unknown to readers until now—are the microfictions sprinkled throughout these notebooks, none more than a paragraph long, and many just a single sentence.

Acclaimed Hawthorne scholar Robert S. Levine has selected 200 of these intriguing short works, arranging them into thematic groups covering topics like the writing life, divided selves, and death and imagined afterlives. They reveal Hawthorne as a radical, strikingly modern literary experimenter, their extreme compression and dreamlike strangeness calling to mind Kafka’s parables and aphorisms. Gathered here in a single volume for the first time, they offer thrilling access to what Hawthorne called “the inmost Me behind its veil”—the creative essence of one of America’s greatest storytellers.

About the Author

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts, the son and grandson of proud New England seafarers. In 1825 he graduated from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and returned to Salem determined to become a writer of short stories. For the next twelve years he was plagued with unhappiness and self-doubts as he struggled to master his craft. He finally secured some small measure of success with the publication of his Twice-Told Tales (1837). His marriage to Sophia Peabody in 1842 was a happy one. The Scarlet Letter (1850), which brought him immediate recognition, was followed by The House of the Seven Gables (1851). After serving four years as the American Consul in Liverpool, England, he traveled in Italy; he returned home to Massachusetts in 1860. Depressed, weary of writing, and failing in health, he died on May 19, 1864, at Plymouth, New Hampshire.

Robert S. Levine is Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Maryland and the author of numerous books including The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson and, most recently, After Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Quest for Interracial Democracy. He has edited two Norton Critical Editions of The House of the Seven Gables and the John Harvard edition of The Blithedale Romance and is a longstanding member of the Editorial Board of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review.