The complete online text of A Virtuoso's Collection (From "Mosses from an Old Manse") by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Although Nathaniel Hawthorne called himself "the obscurest man in American letters," his achievements in fiction, both as short-story writer and novelist, offer models fashioned too well for contemporary and later writers to ignore. Even though fame was...

When Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, on our most patriotic holiday in 1804, his ancestral roots were already deeply planted in New England. Writing in The Scarlet Letter (1850) of his sentimental affection for the town of his birth,...

In sketches, tales, and romances published in the second third of the nineteenth century, Nathaniel Hawthorne chose mainly American materials, drawing especially on the history of colonial New England and his native Salem in the time of his early America...

Events in Nepal came to a crisis as we were completing this issue of off our backs. After three weeks of protests, dictator King Gyanendra was forced to reinstate parliament--a victory for the Nepalese democracy movement. We interview Sharmila Karki, a Nepalese democracy...

In the mid-1930s Virginia and Alexander Weddell acquired two seventeenthcentury Spanish barguenos (one of which is pictured right), or traveling desks, at auction in Buenos Aires. Now housed at Virginia House in Richmond, both are made of walnut and decorated with bone, gold leaf,...