Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Critical Biography – Mark Van Doren, 1949 ★★★

An Imperfect Greatness

How to rank Nathaniel Hawthorne among the literary giants? He did so much to give serious fiction a uniquely American idiom and character. Yet how many Hawthorne masterpieces are there?

As Mark Van Doren sees it, there are just two. One is widely regarded as the first great American novel. The other, a short story, is just as powerful in the myriad ways it details the evilness of the human heart. Both are majestic, but after that, Hawthorne too often suffered from a willingness to err on the side of comfort, both his own and the reader’s.

Does Van Doren’s minimalist appreciation convince? I don’t think he even tries that hard. But he does offer a bracing way to consider Hawthorne’s deceptively genial legacy from a perspective of eighty years on, a legacy just as bracing eighty years after that.

The Marble Faun – Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1860 ★★

Mixing Life and Art in the Eternal City

The final novel by the first great American novelist has so much going for it in isolated moments that its undeniable dreadfulness as a whole winds up a thing of wonder.

Imagine a book so filled with magnificent vistas that one feels flush from the radiance of summer mornings that came and went 150 years ago. Imagine lengthy dialogues between a religious believer and a skeptic which genuinely respects the substance of both viewpoints. Imagine social and artistic discursions touching upon centuries of Western civilization.

Then imagine all this being secondary to a plot about whether a man has furry, pointy ears; how a glance can constitute complicity in a murder; and why two bland couples can somehow never find happiness together.

The Blithedale Romance – Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1852 ★★★½

Subjectivity Triumphs Over All

Unconventional people went by different names in different eras. In more recent history, they were known as “beatniks” or “hippies.” In the mid-1800s, they were known as something else: transcendentalists.

What they were transcending was wide-ranging and amorphous, but their commitment to living in a world free of conventions was clear. For them, nature was a source of truth more powerful than any human creed. Who cared about money or class when there was eternal beauty?

Nathaniel Hawthorne was for a time one of these seekers, making his home for a few months in a utopian community called Brook Farm just outside Boston. While his time there wasn’t long, its impact went deep enough to form the basis of perhaps his most personal novel.

The Snow-Image And Other Twice-Told Tales – Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851 ★★

Hawthorne's Final Grab Bag

There is not enough fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne; life kept getting in his way. But he wrote more tales and sketches than I once thought.

Much better known are two other short-fiction collections. The first is a recognized classic of American literature, Twice-Told Tales. The second, Mosses From An Old Manse, may be his greatest book. Just recently I found this later collection containing some of the last short pieces Hawthorne wrote.

Just how essential is The Snow-Image, anyway?

The House Of The Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851 ★★★½

Gingerbread Gothic

A memorable title and immersive setting are the main takeaways people get from this American classic, which seems fair to me. When a novelist accomplishes one thing so brilliantly, why carp about the characters or story?

A fiction set around a real building, still extant in Salem, Massachusetts, The House Of The Seven Gables concerns the Pyncheons, once a proud Puritan family now brought low by poverty and greed. How low we discover early in the book, when scowling spinster Hepzibah Pyncheon takes the radical step of turning part of the mansion into a cent shop.

She needs money to support herself and her mentally-impaired brother, Clifford. At the moment, the only money in her family belongs to her cousin Jaffrey, a judge and politician who embodies the Pyncheons’ cruel legacy. Hepzibah knows too well not to trust his offers of help.

Mosses From An Old Manse – Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1846 ★★★★★

 A Writer Arrives

In the annals of American literature, no eminence put himself down with more avidity than Nathaniel Hawthorne. Titling his second published collection of writings Mosses From An Old Manse after calling his first Twice-Told Tales is a clear sign of low self-esteem.

Which would you rather read? Some choice, right?

Mosses From An Old Manse is the less-known title, but a better book. Though not narratively connected, having been originally published over a number of years, they lay out Hawthorne’s compelling visions for the nature of art in society and the whole meaning of life. Not every short story in it is a masterpiece; not every masterpiece in it is a short story.

Fanshawe – Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1828 ★★

The Debut that Wasn't

If American literature were allowed its own debut novel, it would have been The Scarlet Letter, bursting with quintessential Yankee ingenuity and Puritan wrath. Certainly if Nathaniel Hawthorne had his way, that would have been his debut.

But it’s not. More than 20 years before publishing what he claimed was his first novel, Hawthorne produced a shorter fiction book. So traumatic was its memory that he not only disowned it, but burned every copy he could find. Despite his efforts, Fanshawe still exists to be read today.

Though not in the class of Hawthorne’s best-known works, Fanshawe is hardly worthy of the pyre. A creaky romance overdone in some places, underbaked in others, it does have its charms.

Twice-Told Tales – Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1837 & 1842 ★★★

The Iron Tissue of Allegory

Allegory in stories is unpopular for many reasons.

They are moralistic. They present cardboard characters and a restricted point-of-view. Critical aspects of fiction-writing like tone and voice are lost when it all boils down to imparting a lesson.

So in noting that Twice-Told Tales presents Nathaniel Hawthorne as master of allegory, I realize this is like praising with faint damns.

The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850 ★★★★

Hester's Enduring Legacy

When a widely-celebrated novel has been around a long time, it gets harder to be objective about it. Say you like it, and you feel like a conformist. Say you don’t, and you’re a crank.

The Scarlet Letter is undoubtedly great, but after 170 years, is it still any good? Does its iron code of morality strike one now as authentic or dated? Is its celebrated symbolism subtle or strained?