by Nathaniel Nathaniel Hawthorne
First published 2016
This annotated collection draws from Nathaniel Hawthorne's three major volumes of short fiction and sketches. Hawthorne published "Twice-Told Tales," "Mosses from an Old Manse," and "The Snow Image and Other Tales" across his career, but he remained his own harshest critic. In the prefaces to these works, he displayed characteristic self-doubt about his literary achievements. He openly acknowledged the weaknesses in many of the "Twice-Told Tales" pieces. He dismissed "Mosses from an Old Manse" as insufficient foundation for lasting literary recognition. When he gathered his earlier and later writings into his final collection, he compared the mixture to fruit picked at different seasons, noting that "the ripened autumnal fruit tastes but little better than the early windfalls." His candid assessments reveal an artist perpetually dissatisfied with his own work, even as these collections established his reputation in American letters.
Genres: classics, classic-literature, anthologies, american-fiction, 20th-century, american, biographical-fiction, 19th-century
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
Period: 19th-Century, 20th-Century
82 pages · Paperback · CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform