American Literature of the 19th Century
I suppose my love of literature in general began specifically with the American literature of the Nineteenth Century. Elementary school encounters with Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe gave a sense of a whole story, a wide and vivid painting of a setting and characters and events. Short stories were taught throughout public school, and the short story was mastered by American writers in the Nineteenth Century. so the best was offered in the big reader anthologies of fifty years ago. I acquired a complete set of Nathaniel Hawthorne and read every volume, including the notebooks. Later I delighted in discovering the “off-canon” writers, particularly Bret Harte and Harriet Beecher Stowe. This page of my usual offerings in the store is not comprehensive, but I am working toward that. I hope it inspires returns to favorites, new discoveries, and rounding out earlier reading.
Young Goodman Brown and Other Tales
Young Goodman Brown and Other Tales
The first paperback edition to include full annotations of these twenty Hawthorne tales written between the 1830s and 50s, this volume contains the classic pieces "Young Goodman Brown," "The Maypole of Merry Mount," "The Birthmark," "The Celestial Railroad," and "Earth's Holocaust," as well as tales, such as "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," which represent Hawthorne's interest in the spiritual history of New England.
