Twice-Told Tales (The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, V. 9)

The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
Collection of previously published short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, issued in 1837 and revised and expanded in 1842. The 1837 edition consisted of 18 stories; the 1842 enlargement brought the total to 39. Stories such as "The Gray Champion," "The May-pole of Marymount," "The Gentle Boy," and "Endicott and the Red Cross" reflect Hawthorne's moral insight and his lifelong interest in the history of Puritan New England. Among other tales are the allegorical "The Ambitious Guest"; "The Minister's Black Veil" and "Wakefield," psychological explorations of sin and guilt; "Howe's Masquerade," a ghostly legend set in Boston just prior to the American Revolution; and "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment," an allegorical search for the Fountain of Youth.


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Hawthorne's famous collection of tales - published originally in magazines and newspapers and then in two separate editions during Hawthorne's lifetime - includes many of his best stories, from "The Minister's Black Veil" and "Wakefield" to "Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe" and "The Lily's Quest." Animated, as Rosemary Mahoney writes in the Introduction, by "the struggle between chaos and order, animal impulse and the specter of eternal damnation, purity of action against the power of temptation and the fear of isolation," these stories - like all of Hawthorne's work - remain powerfully contemporary.


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