Mosses from an old manse
Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1840
An author of haunting metaphors and elaborate prose who explores the fragile boundary between wild instinct, civilization, and the enduring weight of the human spirit.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
1804–1864
Hawthorne's sentences move slowly and deliberately, and his stories often turn on a single image — a veil, a footprint, a face at a window — that stays with you longer than the plot. Both «Twice-told tales» and «Mosses from an old manse» are collections of short pieces set in and around Puritan New England, where ordinary people brush against something they cannot explain. Start with «Twice-told tales» if you want the shorter, starker fables; «Mosses from an old manse» gathers longer sketches and stories in the same vein, including the ones about a man who steps out of his own life and the strange hours before dawn.
Feels like melancholy, nature and morality.
Start with Mosses from an old manse.
Hawthorne's style is heavily influenced by American Romanticism, which often blends high philosophical concepts with deep, brooding natural imagery.
When sacred architecture is made of blazing wood, what does it reveal about human conviction?
In the interval of silence he stole forward until the light glared full upon his eyes. At one extremity of an open space, hemmed in by the dark wall of the forest, arose a rock, bearing some rude, natural resemblance either to an altar or a pulpit, and surrounded by four blazing pines, their tops aflame, their stems untouched, like candles at an evening meeting. The mass of foliage that had overgrown the summit of the rock was all on fire, blazing high into the night and fitfully illuminating the whole field. Each pendent twig and leafy festoon was in a blaze. As the red light arose and fell, a numerous congregation alternately shone forth, then disappeared in shadow, and again grew, as it were, out of the darkness, peopling the heart of the solitary woods at once. Books by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Twice-told tales
Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1837
Short fables from Puritan New England: veiled ministers, men who step out of their own lives, and the strange, small hours before dawn.
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