Publisher's Synopsis
Written by Bill Kerwin: I believe Hawthorne's collection Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) may be superior to his earlier Twice Told Tales (1837, 1842). It boasts just as many Hawthorne short story masterpieces ('The Birth-mark, ' 'Young Goodman Brown, ' 'Rappaccini's Daughter, ' and The Artist of the Beautiful') and nearly as many near-masterpieces too ('Egotism, or the Bosom-Serpent' 'Drowne's Wooden Image, ' 'Roger Malvin's Burial, ' 'Feathertop'), all exploring the classic Hawthorniean themes of the artist versus the scientist, the dreamer versus the practical man, the motivations for human creation and the diabiolic forces that tear them apart.In addition to the short stories mentioned here, however, Mosses possesses other beauties, including 1) a first class familiar essay, 'The Old Manse, ' in which the writer describes his Concord home in its surroundings (including cameo appearances by Concord's famous citizens, Emerson and Thoreau), 2) two unique, totally successful Bunyanesque allegories, 'The Celestial Railroad' (a speedy train trip through Pilgrim's Progress country) and "Earth's Holocaust" (humankind gathers on a Western plain to pitch its supposed vanities into a bonfire, and 3) a half-dozen or so other allegories, all of the Spenserian variety, each more elaborate and intricate than the one before ('A Select Party, ' 'The Hall of Fantasy, ' 'The Procession of Life, ' 'The Christmas Banquet, ' 'The Intelligence Office, ' 'A Virtuoso's Collection'). I found some of these narratives to be difficult, others baffling-I remember reading somewhere that Hawthorne, years later, was puzzled by the meaning of some of them himself-but there is something about their ornate style, the rarified nature of the personifications, that speaks of something new in Hawthorne. They were all written during the Old Manse period, sometime in the middle '40's, and I believe they point forward to The Scarlet Letter (1850), the emergence of a nuanced symbolic style.Read it. It is one of the classics of American literature, more essential-and odder-than you m
