Nathaniel Hawthorne: Parables, Fantasies, Fragments

Here for the first time Hawthorne’s mind-bending short parables, fantasies, and fragments have been collected by an eminent Hawthorne scholar, culled from the author’s massive notebooks.

Nathaniel Hawthorne graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825 and returned home to Salem, Massachusetts. Over the next nearly twenty years, he mostly resided at the family home, with his mother and sisters, and worked on his writing in his second story bedroom-study. During that time, he kept a series of notebooks, now called the American Notebooks, which were an important source for some of the stories in his first two volumes—Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Mosses from an Old Manse (1845)—and even for some of the later novels.

Mainly, however, the American Notebooks served as a writer’s repository where Hawthorne could let his imagination wander freely, without having to worry about being called unconventional, weird, depressive, or even mad. Some of Hawthorne’s best and most experimental writing can be found in his journal fragments, none of which are more than a paragraph, and the majority are simply a sentence or two.

This remarkable new book extracts approximately 9,000 words of fragments from the over 800,000 words of Hawthorne’s published American, English, French, and Italian notebooks to reveal, for the first time, Hawthorne as a radical literary experimenter and proto-modernist.

"To have one event operate in several places—as, for example, if a man’s head were to be cut off in the town, men’s heads to drop off in several other towns."

"Little gnomes dwelling in hollow teeth; they find a tooth that has been plugged with gold; and it serves them as a gold mine."Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts, the son and grandson of proud New England seafarers. In 1825 he graduated from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and returned to Salem determined to become a writer of short stories. For the next twelve years he was plagued with unhappiness and self-doubts as he struggled to master his craft. He finally secured some small measure of success with the publication of his Twice-Told Tales (1837). His marriage to Sophia Peabody in 1842 was a happy one. The Scarlet Letter (1850), which brought him immediate recognition, was followed by The House of the Seven Gables (1851). After serving four years as the American Consul in Liverpool, England, he traveled in Italy; he returned home to Massachusetts in 1860. Depressed, weary of writing, and failing in health, he died on May 19, 1864, at Plymouth, New Hampshire.

Robert S. Levine is Distinguished University Professor of English at the Univerty of Maryland and the author of numerous books including, most recently, The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson. He has edited two Norton Critical Editions of The House of the Seven Gables and the John Harvard edition of The Blithedale Romance and is a longstanding member of the Editorial Board of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review. His next book, After Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Quest for Interracial Democracy, will be published by Norton late 2026.