Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 - 1864)

Genre: General Fiction

Born in Salem, Mass, Hawthorne graduated from Bowdoin with Longfellow in 1825. His book Fanshawe, published anonymously in 1828, was set at Bowdoin College, which offers an online collection guide to Hawthorne's personal papers. Hawthorne also lived in Portland in 1818 and in Raymond for a few years around 1816.

Bartleby's extensive excerpt on Hawthorne, from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, offers chapters on Hawthorne and Puritanism, His Relations with the Transcendentalists, The Facts of his Life, Early Stories, Later Romances, His Close Observation of Life, and Transcendental Doctrines in Hawthorne. The Hawthorne pages in the Early American Fiction section of the University of Virginia Library (scroll down) access to many online texts (though only a few are accessible to the public). Bedford/St. Martin publishers also offers a biography and timeline of Hawthorne's life. The Hawthorne Society publishes the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, available to members of the society.

A full-text version of The Scarlet Letter (1850) is online, as well as generous background material on The Scarlet Letter and Hawthorne, through the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Many Hawthorne short stories are available in their entirety through Classic Reader. Teachers can find college-level lesson tips for teaching Hawthorne at Houghton Mifflin's site, as well as lots of background, print resources, and discussion questions from Paul Reuben's Perspectives in American Literature Hawthorne page. Lesson plans for teaching Hawthorne at all grade levels are found at the Internet School Library Media Center. An excellent essay on Hawthorne's short fiction and prose sketches is found on the Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page.

An incomplete Hawthorne bibliography includes:

• Fanshawe (1828)
• Twice Told Tales (1837; 1851)
• Mosses from an Old Manse (1846 & 1854; 2 volumes)
• The House of the Seven Gables, a Romance (1851)
• The Scarlet Letter, a Romance (1850)
• The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales (1851)
• True Stories from History and Biography (1851)
• The Blithedale Romance (1852)
• The Life of Franklin Pierce (1852)
• A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1852)
• Tanglewood Tales for Girls and Boys (1853)
• The Marble Faun; or, The Romance of Monte Beni (1860; 2 volumes)
• Our Old Home (1863)
• Passages from the American Note-Books (1868; 2 vols)
• Passages from the English Note-Books (1870; 2 vols)
• Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books (1871; 2 vols)
• Septimius, a Romance (1872)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne: Collected Novels (1983), published by Library of America, includes Fanshawe, The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun
• Selected Tales & Sketches (1988)

A very extensive Hawthorne bibliography is housed at Bartleby.


Last Update: 05/30/2007

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