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...
Paul Auster. The Brooklyn Follies. Holt, 2006. 306 pp. $24.00. Like Paul Auster's other recent novels, The Book of Illusions and Oracle Night, The Brooklyn Follies is a postmodern page-turner, drawing us immediately into its narrator's broken world. Nathan Glass, retired, recently divorced,...
Gilbert Sorrentino. Lunar Follies. Coffee House Press, 2005. 143 pp. Paper: $14.00. Sorrentino is a master, but a particular specialty of his has always been illustrating the "eight million ways to step off the cliff"-or lose one's soul-in the pursuit of art. No...
