Nathaniel Hawthorne: Parables, Fantasies, Fragments

Here for the first time Hawthorne’s mind-bending short parables, fantasies, and fragments have been collected by an eminent Hawthorne scholar, culled from the author’s massive notebooks.

Nathaniel Hawthorne graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825 and returned home to Salem, Massachusetts. Over the next nearly twenty years, he mostly resided at the family home, with his mother and sisters, and worked on his writing in his second story bedroom-study. During that time, he kept a series of notebooks, now called the American Notebooks, which were an important source for some of the stories in his first two volumes—Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Mosses from an Old Manse (1845)—and even for some of the later novels.

Mainly, however, the American Notebooks served as a writer’s repository where Hawthorne could let his imagination wander freely, without having to worry about being called unconventional, weird, depressive, or even mad. Some of Hawthorne’s best and most experimental writing can be found in his journal fragments, none of which are more than a paragraph, and the majority are simply a sentence or two.

This remarkable new book extracts approximately 9,000 words of fragments from the over 800,000 words of Hawthorne’s published American, English, French, and Italian notebooks to reveal, for the first time, Hawthorne as a radical literary experimenter and proto-modernist.

“To have one event operate in several places—as, for example, if a man’s head were to be cut off in the town, men’s heads to drop off in several other towns.”

“Little gnomes dwelling in hollow teeth; they find a tooth that has been plugged with gold; and it serves them as a gold mine.”