Nathaniel Hawthorne

A mysterious minister who never removes the black veil shrouding his face, an eccentric scientist who experiments with the fate of his friends, a cheerful tombstone carver who speaks the wisdom of the graveyard, these are but a few of the unusual New Englanders you'll meet in Twice-Told Tales.

The White Hills of New Hampshire are the setting for Hawthorne's three short stories. This collection of tales is an engaging compendium of Hawthorne's short stories, including many set in and around the writer's native New England. The title story is a charming fable-like tale that takes as its focus a long-famous geological feature in the New Hampshire mountains (the face-like granite protrusion collapsed in 2003).

"Rappaccini's Daughter" is a Gothic short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne first published in the December 1844. It is about Giacomo Rappaccini, a medical researcher in Padua, Italy, who grows a garden of poisonous plants. He brings up his daughter to tend the plants, and she becomes resistant to the poisons, but in the process she herself becomes poisonous to others.

Aylmer is an inventor, the greatest of his age. But his heart is torn between his devotion to science and his love for his beautiful wife, Georgiana, whose appearance would be perfect were it not for the small red birthmark on her cheek. Unnaturally obsessed with the blemish, Aylmer sets out to erase it from his beloved's face-and discovers that his heedless quest to master Nature has disastrous consequences.   A Gothic romance both chilling and...

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"...

A collection of Greek myths retold as fairy tales.

The novel follows a New England family and their ancestral home, exploring themes of guilt, retribution, and atonement, and colors the tale with suggestions of the supernatural and witchcraft. The setting for the book was inspired by the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion, a gabled house in Salem, Massachusetts, belonging to Nathaniel Hawthorne's cousin Susanna Ingersoll.

In a New England town in the early 19th century lives Dr. Grimshawe, an eccentric recluse, and two orphans, Ned and Elsie. The children are involved in a secret related to an estate in England, whence the doctor originally came. This estate has lacked a direct heir since the reign of Charles I, when the incumbent disappeared, leaving a bloody footprint on the threshold. After their guardian's death, the children are separated, but meet again years...