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Biographical Sketches

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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4.18
1,284 rating

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Book Excerpt: 
. . .Puritan provinces, and wherever those governments extended an effectual sway, no depth nor solitude of the wilderness could exclude youth from all the common opportunities of moral, and far more than common ones of religious education. Each settlement of the Pilgrims was a little piece of the Old World inserted into the New. It was like Gideon's fleece, unwet with dew: the desert wind that breathed over it left none of its wild influences there. But the first settlers of Maine and New Hampshire were led thither entirely by carnal motives: their governments were feeble, uncertain, sometimes nominally annexed to their sister colonies, and sometimes asserting a troubled independence. Their rulers might be deemed, in more than one instance, lawless adventurers, who found that security in the forest which they had forfeited in Europe. Their clergy (unlike that revered band who acquired so singular a fame elsewhere in New England) were too often destitute of the religious f. . . Read More

Community Reviews

4.00
- JoAnn - Feb 03, 2010

Just read "The Artist of the Beautiful. "A beautiful story of one man's life-long pursuit of creating his dream of the beautiful and the sacrifices he makes and obstacles he overcomes in achieving that dream. Must read again to fully appreciate the beauty this artist created with words.

5.00
- Bianca - Oct 24, 2014

HAWTHORNE IS PERFECT. NO MORE WORDS TO DEFINE HIM.

4.00
- Jeff - Jul 15, 2013

Very interesting and unexpected; this was like a Grimm's Fairy Tales set in Colonial New England. Demons, witches, hypocritical Puritans, and a variety of fantastical plot twists. Many of the stories are rather dark, but not all. Hawthorne also has some interesting observations on life and the human

5.00
- Paula - Jan 30, 2013

Marvelous! I love Hawthorne's short reads. When I read his stories,I always feel thrust into the 1800s with such juicy detail. Nobody brings you into that era as dramatically as Hawthorne does. His stories are deep with his thinking and explorations into the supernatural. Most times, his characters

4.00
- Brian - Jun 21, 2022

Most readers will have been introduced to Hawthorne, if at all, through The Scarlet Letter. This comprehensive collection of shorter works are an alternative approach to Hawthorne's work most importantly through his earlier works of stories, sketches, and allegorical observations, the strongest of w

5.00
- v - Jun 28, 2021

For the past two years America's greatest short story writer has kept me company whenever I needed him. My flourishing sentimentalism won't do much to convince anyone of Nathaniel Hawthorne's stature but put in another form it might: across its roughly 1100 pages, Tales and Sketches doesn't include

5.00
- James - Jul 26, 2018

True talent is born, not made. Although his earliest works show an immaturity (which disappears as the writer hones his work) Hawthorne’s gift is apparent from the beginning. His tales may be uneven – some maddening for questionable conclusions, others tending toward the mundane – but all create won

4.00
- Zepp - Jul 11, 2008

Lots of amazing stuff. The layout of this edition, while comprehensive, is more scholarly than readable- go ahead and skip the chronological framework and read his best 9 or 12 or 20 stories along with the random gels. Even the editions published during his lifetime are broken scattered and arranged

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