Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tales (collection, 1987)

When I was in college, I read some Hawthorne short stories in an American literature class, and I enjoyed them much more than I had his novels.* So I resolved to read more of his shorts and over the years I've picked up a couple collections of them, the first of which I've finally gotten around to reading is this, a Norton Critical Edition collecting twenty-one stories, plus the usual NCE array of contextual and critical materials.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tales: Authoritative Texts, Backgrounds, Criticism
edited by James McIntosh

Collection published: 1987
Contents originally published: 1832-52
Acquired: December 2008
Read: February 2026

Well, maybe it was my mood, maybe I wasn't being patient enough (reading short story collections uses different muscles than novels), but I struggled with a number of these. "The Birthmark" and "Rappacini's Daughter" are both as good as ever, but I felt like most of the new-to-me stories didn't really click except for "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" and "The Celestial Raild-road." The former is a well-observed story of character; the latter is fun riff updating Pilgrim's Progress for the industrial era. But going back over the table of contents now, I struggle to recall any of the others.

I think my other Hawthorne book, Library of America's Tales and Sketches, is comprehensive and thus includes everything collected here; maybe I'll be in a better zone to enjoy these stories when I reread them there.

(I didn't read any of the supplemental material here, which runs almost two hundred pages. I'm not in grad school, you can't make me.) 

* It is funny to read that review of Blithedale Romance, which I wrote almost twenty years ago, before I even had gone off to grad school. Oh no, a book where it takes several pages for interesting things to happen! Clearly grad school levelled up my reading skills. Reading a bunch of George Eliot and Wilkie Collins will do that, I guess.