Table of Contents

The Portable HawthorneIntroduction
Chronology

I. The Tales (1830-1852)

Editor's Note
My Kinsman, Mayor Molineux
Roger Malvin's Burial
Young Goodman Brown
The Minister's Black Veil
The Man of Adamant
The Birth-Mark
Rappaccini's Daughter
Prefaces
from "The Old Manse"
to Twice-told Tales
to The Snow-Image

II. The Scarlet Letter (1850)

Editor's Note

III. The Published Romances (1851-1860)

Editor's Note
from The House of the Seven Gables
from The Blithedale Romance
from The Marble Faun

IV. The European Journals (1853-1860)

Editor's Note
from the English, French, and Italian Journals

V. The Last Years (1861-1864)

Editor's Note
Passages from the letters and the Unfinished Romances

Suggestions for Further Reading

About the Author

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts, the son and grandson of proud New England seafarers. He lived in genteel poverty with his widowed mother and two young sisters in a house filled with Puritan ideals and family pride in a prosperous past. His boyhood was, in most respects, pleasant and normal. In 1825 he was graduated from Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, and he 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.
William C. Spengemann is the Hale Professor in Arts and Sciences and Professor of English Emeritus at Dartmouth College. He edited the Penguin Classics edition of Nineteenth-Century American Poetry.