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.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's haunting short parables, fantasies, and fragments gathered from his private notebooks for the first time.

After graduating from college in 1825, Nathaniel Hawthorne returned home to Salem, Massachusetts, where he lived with his mother and sisters for most of the next two decades, honing his craft in his third-story bedroom. During that time, he kept a series of journals, now called the American Notebooks, that became a vital taproot for his stories and novels. They also served as a laboratory where Hawthorne could experiment with fictional ideas and premises, letting his extraordinary imagination play with intriguing, sometimes wild possibilities. Some of his oddest, boldest, and most secretive writing-- virtually unknown to readers until now--are the microfictions sprinkled throughout these notebooks, none more than a paragraph long, and many just a single sentence.

Acclaimed Hawthorne scholar Robert S. Levine has selected 200 of these intriguing short works, arranging them into thematic groups covering topics like the writing life, divided selves, and death and imagined afterlives. They reveal Hawthorne as a radical, strikingly modern literary experimenter, their extreme compression and dreamlike strangeness calling to mind Kafka's parables and aphorisms. Gathered here in a single volume for the first time, they offer thrilling access to what Hawthorne called "the inmost Me behind its veil"--the creative essence of one of America's greatest storytellers.