Written in a richly suggestive style, Hawthorne’s five world-famous novels are permeated by his own history as well as America’s In The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne alludes to his ancestor’s involvement in the Salem witch trials, as he follows the fortunes of two rival families, the Maules and the Pyncheons. The novel moves across 150 years of American history, from an ancestral crime condoned by Puritan theocracy to reconciliation and a new beginning in the bustling Jacksonian era. Considered Hawthorne’s greatest work, 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 transgression of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, the innate lawlessness of their bastard child Pearl, and the torturous jealousy of the husband Roger Chillingworth eventually erupt through the stern reserve of Puritan Boston. The Scarlet Letter engages the moral and romantic imagination of readers who ponder the question of sexual freedom and its place in the social world. Fanshawe is an engrossing apprentice work that Hawthorne published anonymously and later sought to suppress. Written during his undergraduate years at Bowdoin College, it is a tragic romance of an ascetic scholar’s love for a merchant’s daughter. The Blithedale Romance is a novel about the perils, which Hawthorne knew first-hand, of living in a utopian community. The utilitarian reformer Hollingsworth, the reticent narrator Miles Coverdale, the unearthly Priscilla, and the sensuous Zenobia (purportedly modeled on Margaret Fuller) act out a drama of love and rejection, idealism and chicanery, millennial hope and suicidal despair on an experimental commune in rural Massachusetts. The Marble Faun, Hawthorne’s last finished novel, uses Italian landscapes where sunlight gives way to mythological shadings as a background for mysteries of identity and murder. Its two young Americans, Kenyon and Hilda, become caught up in the disastrous passion of Donatello, an ingenuous nobleman, for the beautiful, mysterious Miriam, a woman trying to escape her past.

The Library of America presents in one giftable collection all 5 of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s world-famous novels—including The House of the Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter. Written in a richly suggestive style that seems remarkably contemporary, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novels permeated by his own history as well as America’s. In The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne alludes to his ancestor’s involvement in the Salem witch trials, as he follows the fortunes of two rival families, the Maules and the Pyncheons. The novel moves across 150 years of American history, from an ancestral crime condoned by Puritan theocracy to reconciliation and a new beginning in the bustling Jacksonian era. Considered Hawthorne’s greatest work, 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 transgression of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, the innate lawlessness of their bastard child Pearl, and the torturous jealousy of the husband Roger Chillingworth eventually erupt through the stern reserve of Puritan Boston. The Scarlet Letter engages the moral and romantic imagination of readers who ponder the question of sexual freedom and its place in the social world. Fanshawe is an engrossing apprentice work that Hawthorne published anonymously and later sought to suppress. Written during his undergraduate years at Bowdoin College, it is a tragic romance of an ascetic scholar’s love for a merchant’s daughter. The Blithedale Romance is a novel about the perils, which Hawthorne knew first-hand, of living in a utopian community. The utilitarian reformer Hollingsworth, the reticent narrator Miles Coverdale, the unearthly Priscilla, and the sensuous Zenobia (purportedly modeled on Margaret Fuller) act out a drama of love and rejection, idealism and chicanery, millennial hope and suicidal despair on an experimental commune in rural Massachusetts. The Marble Faun, Hawthorne’s last finished novel, uses Italian landscapes where sunlight gives way to mythological shadings as a background for mysteries of identity and murder. Its two young Americans, Kenyon and Hilda, become caught up in the disastrous passion of Donatello, an ingenuous nobleman, for the beautiful, mysterious Miriam, a woman trying to escape her past.

Collects legendary and controversial works by the mid-twentieth-century writer including posthumous, unedited, and previously unseen versions, in a comparative anthology that offers insight into the influence of editor Gordon Lish.

This landmark volume combines the entire Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, "The Stories of John Cheever," with seven selections from Cheever's first book, "The Way Some People Live."

Collects the author's short stories, a novella titled "Up Above the World," and a travel book first published in 1963.

Contains twenty-nine short stories exploring the author's themes of relations between the sexes, satire of social class, character, and morality.

"The centerpiece of this Library of America edition of Porter's shorter writings is The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1965), the career-capping volume that won for its author a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. Set in her native Texas and her beloved Mexico, in Greenwich Village, Berlin, and the gothic Old South, these are stories that, in the words of V. S. Pritchett, "suggest the whole rather than the surface of life." They include her first, "Maria Concepcion" (1922), the tale of a Mexican Indian who confronts her husband's lover in a world where jealousy, revenge, and death are constant companions and the first allegiance is always to the living. Also her last, "Holiday" (1960), in which a young woman's account of her summer vacation - as the paying guest of a family of German farmers on the Texas - Louisiana border - deepens into a meditation on mute suffering, the rituals of death, and the death-in-life that is the failure to recognize a fellow person's humanity. All 26 stories - among them such masterpieces as "Flowering Judas," "Noon Wine," and "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" - are wide in vision but laser-sharp in focus; they exemplify, in the words of Mary Gordon, "the clarity and inclusiveness of the art we proclaim as great."" "Here too, in the most comprehensive selection ever published, are Porter's short nonfiction writings, including speeches, notes, and essays on the writer's craft, literary reflections on Hardy, Pound, and Welty, political dispatches from revolutionary Mexico, and a personal history of the Sacco-Vanzetti case - some 80 items in all, concluding with two previously uncollected essays in autobiography. Storyteller and critic, reporter and book reviewer, private citizen and public figure, Porter in this collection can at last be seen whole, in all her roles and variety and excellence. She is unforgettable, a multifaceted master of American prose."--BOOK JACKET.

A collection of essential writings features Thoreau's poetry and essays on nature, materialism, conformity, and politics; including such works as "Slavery in Massachusetts," "Civil Disobedience," "A Winter Walk," and "Life Without Principle."

Contents: Complete poems 1949 - In the Clearing - Uncollected poems - Plays - Selected prose. Includes index of first lines and index of prose.

Presents five novels by Dashiell Hamilton, all published between 1929 and 1934.