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...
A GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS By Joyce Carol Oates Modern Library. 404 pp. Paperback, $13.95 Forgive me, but I just don't get it. When the Modern Library decided to reprint Joyce Carol Oates's 1967 novel A Garden of Earthly Delights as...
Excruciatingly literate, overdesigned and dramatically inert, Michel Deville's "La Lectrice" is an elaborate intellectual tease. Based on the novel by Raymond Jean, the film tells the story of a perky young woman named Constance, played by Miou-Miou, who one night crawls into bed with...
