Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Diaries, Letters, Reminiscences and Extensive Biographies (Unabridged) ebook

This capacious unabridged anthology reconstructs Nathaniel Hawthorne's life and imaginative stature through diaries, correspondence, reminiscences, criticism, and biography. Its documentary intimacy meets a striking range of nineteenth-century prose: private observation, familial recollection, literary appraisal, and interpretive narrative. Hawthorne's own records illuminate the habits and tensions behind his fiction, while the volume's most consequential critical materials place his romance, symbolism, and moral ambiguity within the development of American literature. The collection gathers Hawthorne alongside writers and commentators bound to his legacy by kinship, friendship, and literary inheritance. Herman Melville's searching response to Hawthorne registers the force of his "darkness" upon the American Renaissance; Julian Hawthorne supplies the distinctive perspective of a son negotiating memory and myth; and F. P. Stearns and G. P. Lathrop contribute formative biographical and critical accounts. Together, these voices reveal how Hawthorne became central to debates about romance, realism, Puritan history, and national literary identity. Ideal for students, scholars, and general readers, this volume offers an unusually rich encounter with both an author and the making of an authorial reputation. Its juxtaposition of primary testimony and later interpretation encourages readers to test biography against art, remembrance against criticism, and private life against public genius.