The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne

Guilt, secrecy, and the long shadow of Puritan New England run through everything Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, and this collected edition brings his fiction together in a single substantial volume.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was born in Salem, Massachusetts, a town whose witch trials he could trace back to his own great-great-grandfather, and that inheritance marks almost everything he published. He wrote romances and short tales in roughly equal measure: The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851) alongside the darker sketches gathered as Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse. Between books he worked in the Salem Custom House and later served as American consul in Liverpool.

His writing sits close to the root of American literature. Herman Melville dedicated Moby-Dick to him, Henry James wrote a whole study of his career, and the tales are still read for their unease as much as their plots. This edition is for readers who want Hawthorne at length, in a single place, rather than a novel at a time.