This little collection gathers seven of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories, including “Young Goodman Brown,” “The Birthmark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” “The Artist of the Beautiful,” “Roger Malvin’s Burial” and “Major Molineux.”
Hawthorne’s fiction burrows in the intersection of Puritan morality, private guilt, superstition and psychological disturbance, so much so they become almost impossible to separate. His characters repeatedly seek certainty—about innocence, virtue, science, beauty, faith—and discover that certainty itself may be the more dangerous appetite.
“Young Goodman Brown” remains the obvious centrepiece: a nightmare of religious suspicion in which a man’s encounter with possible evil destroys his ability to trust the ordinary world. But the other stories broaden the picture considerably. “The Birthmark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter” turn scientific ambition into grotesque moral experiments; “The Artist of the Beautiful” asks what happens to art in a world that values usefulness; elsewhere Hawthorne worries at inheritance, repression, perfection and the American fantasy of moral purity. Strange, allegorical and often genuinely nasty beneath their nineteenth-century composure.
Dover Publications, 1992. Dover Thrift Edition. Paperback. Cover shows moderate shelf wear, rubbing and surface scratching with some creasing and edge/corner wear; pages mildly age-toned but clean, with no obvious annotations visible. Binding intact. Good condition.
