The complete online text of Septimius Felton, or, the Elixir of Life 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...