Selected Tales and Sketches

With a determined commitment to the history of his native land, Nathaniel Hawthorne revealed, more incisively than any writer of his generation, the nature of a distinctly American consciousness. The pieces collected here deal with essential American matters: the Puritan past, the Indians, the Revolution. But Hawthorne was highly--often wickedly--unorthodox in his account of life in early America, and his precisely constructed plots quickly engage the reader's imagination.