Just A Quick One About Nathaniel Hawthorne

 Did you have to read The Scarlet Letter in high school? I did. And thought, Ho-hum. It was a thing that had to be done; a quaint, safe novel. Yeah, well, it may well have been. Then over the years I read his short stories. At least that is my memory – the stories came after the novel. 

Edgar Allan Poe gets credit for inventing the short story. Hawthorne did a good job of helping with the birth. Poe also the reputation for the spooky, the terrorized, but Hawthorne has his own creepiness. For some reason, his stories hang heavier on me than do Poe's.

Interesting Literature's A Summary and Analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ may prove my point.

‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ is a short story by the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64), first published in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review in December 1844. The story is about an Italian medical researcher who grows poisonous plants in his garden. His daughter grows up to be immune to all of the poisons – but is poisonous to others who come into contact with her.

Where Poe is lurid, Hawthorne is more straightforward. That feels creepier to me, even a bit depressing.

In prison, I read Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables and The Marble Faun. Romanticism aside, I did not think the former held up as a novel, and I think the latter a better novel than the former and perhaps even The Scarlet Letter. Yes, a perverse opinion for sure.

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