Book Description

This is the annotated edition including both volumes of the original book, a rare and extensive biographical essay on the author, as well as an essay by Edgar Allan Poe on Hawthorne's tale-writing.

Hawthorne's early stories were collected in 1837 and published under the title "Twice-Told Tales." They include two of the stories founded on early New England annals, -- "The Gray Champion," based on a tradition of one of the judges of Charles I., and "The Maypole of Merry-Mount," in which Endicott appears as the embodiment of the Puritan spirit.

Besides these are the allegories "Fancy's Show Box," "The Great Carbuncle," and "The Prophetic Pictures;" "The Hollow of the Three Hills," one of the typical stories of witchcraft, foreshadowing some of his later and more powerful work; the curious study, "Wakefield," the popular "Rill from the Town Pump;" the pretty fantasy, "David Swan," in which the lighthearted boy goes on his pilgrimage unconscious of the shadows of possibilities that have fallen across his sleeping face; the pathetic story of Quaker suffering, "The Gentle Boy;" "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment," touching a subject which recurs again in "Septimius Felton" and "The Dolliver Romance;" and the light humor of "Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe," — thus including almost every class of subject on which he afterward touched, though in all he rose to higher levels in his later work.