Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny by Papa (New York Review Books) - Hardcover

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1590170423 ISBN 13: 9781590170427

Publisher: NYRB Classics, 2003

Synopsis

On July 28, 1851, Nathaniel Hawthorne's wife Sophia and daughters Una and Rose left their house in Western Massachusetts to visit relatives near Boston. Hawthorne and his five-year-old son Julian stayed behind. How father and son got along over the next three weeks is the subject of this tender and funny extract from Hawthorne's notebooks.

"At about six o'clock I looked over the edge of my bed and saw that Julian was awake, peeping sideways at me." Each day starts early and is mostly given over to swimming and skipping stones, berry-picking and subduing armies of thistles. There are lots of questions ("It really does seem as if he has baited me with more questions, references, and observations, than mortal father ought to be expected to endure"), a visit to a Shaker community, domestic crises concerning a pet rabbit, and some poignant moments of loneliness ("I went to bed at about nine and longed for Phoebe"). And one evening Mr. Herman Melville comes by to enjoy a late-night discussion of eternity over cigars.

With an introduction by Paul Auster that paints a beautifully observed, intimate picture of the Hawthornes at home, this little-known, true-life story by a great American writer emerges from obscurity to shine a delightful light upon family life—then and now.

About this title

About the Author

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804. After graduating from Bowdoin College in 1825, he returned to Salem, where he wrote historical sketches and allegorical tales, as well as a novel, Fanshawe, which was published anonymously in 1828. Hawthorne’s first book of stories, Twice-Told Tales, appeared in 1837. His marriage to Sophia Peabody, in 1842, led to a move to Concord, after which he wrote the stories gathered in Mosses from an Old Manse and The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales, and the novels The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Romance. During these same years Hawthorne also spent time in the Berkshires (the scene of Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny), where he struck up a friendship with his young admirer Herman Melville. Hawthorne’s last novel, The Marble Faun, was published in 1860.

Paul Auster is the author of ten novels, most recently The Book of Illusions. He lives with his wife and daughter in Brooklyn, NY.

From Booklist

In late July 1851, Sophia Hawthorne and her daughters, seven-year-old Una and two-month-old Rose, went to visit her parents near Boston, leaving her son Julian with his father at home in a small Berkshire hills farmhouse. The novelist kept a journal of the 20 days that he and his five-year-old scion bached it (a housekeeper cooked and cleaned for them, however), which lay buried within the 800-page American Notebooks (1932) until now. As Paul Auster says in a superb introduction more than half as long as the journal, it shows us a different side of Hawthorne. Gone is the density and brooding of his fictional prose, replaced by straightforward recording and clearly registered observation expressed in everyday vocabulary. An undemanding parent, he quite adores his son, though Julian's volubility astounds and occasionally wearies him. He likes to call the little boy "the old gentleman," but otherwise there is nothing precious or sentimental in his writing about him. The journal is a tiny classic of parental writing about children. Ray Olson
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About this edition

• Publisher: NYRB Classics
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1590170423
• ISBN 13: 9781590170427
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 74