Nathaniel Hawthorne

The last of Hawthorne's completed romances showcases the durability of life and art, chronicling the adventures of a group of American expatriates in Italy. Befriended by the handsome Donatello, who possesses all the grace of a marble statue of a faun, the Americans find themselves swept up in events beyond their reason and expectations. Italy and Rone become characters in this witty and symbolic romance, drawing on art, literature, and the Fall from...

It is the mid-seventeenth century in Boston. Hester Prynne, dignified and silent, is led through prison doors to her public shaming by members of the Puritan town. Holding her illegitimate child to her breast, and bearing a bright scarlet letter “A” embroidered on her bodice, Hester must now struggle to create a new life for herself and her child within this censorious community. When her missing spouse reappears, reveals himself to her, and takes...

"The canonical American masterpiece of sin, guilt, and revenge, in an authoritative new edition from Penguin Classics with a foreword by Tom Perrotta At once retrospective and radically new, The Scarlet Letter portrays seventeenth-century Puritan New England, a time period irreversibly encoded in the American identity. Hawthorne built one of the most incisive and devastating human dramas ever written out of a community and its outcasts: Hester Prynne...

Here in one volume are all five of Nathaniel Hawthorne's world-famous novels. "The House of the Seven Gables" moves across 150 years from an ancestral crime condoned by the Puritan theocracy to a new beginning in the bustling and democratic Jacksonian era. Hawthorne's masterpiece, "The Scarlet Letter," is a dramatic allegory of the social consequences of adultery and the subversive force of personal desire in a community of laws. "The Blithedale Romance"...

This extraordinary fragment, left incomplete at the author's death, hints at the direction Hawthorne's genius may have taken had he lived. Ironically, the subject is the search-through science rather than magic-for an "elixir of life." Poignantly, the unfinished manuscript lay upon Hawthorne's coffin during the author's funeral services.