Showing results by author "Nathaniel Hawthorne" in All Categories

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts. A descendant of judge John Hathorne, who oversaw the 1692 Salem Witch Trials, he wrote several works inspired by Puritan New England, with themes of guilt, sin and retribution. This collection contains his classic novel, The Scarlet Letter, as well as four other stories.

The red letter A on her dress marks young mother Hester Prynne among her Puritan neighbors, who demand to know who fathered her child. Rumors swirl, but the shunned and shamed Hester keeps her secret - and his - for years, until a guilt-ridden confession reveals the truth, with unexpected consequences.

In this series we explore the many facets of love through literary talents that span both time and country. Love is good. It’s positive, a source of joy, nourishment and all over goodness. But sometimes other more malevolent forces come to play. They infect that love, they see their form as better. Instinctively we would shy away but sometimes its pull is too powerful, almost attractive. We are drawn closer into the shadows.

Scorned by her 17th century New England Puritan village, Hester Prynne struggles to raise her precocious daughter, Pearl, who is the result of an affair and whose father is unknown. Despite being forced to wear a scarlet letter A as a brand for her adultery, Hester tries to live a life of repentance and dignity. Pearl's father comes forward as he is struggling under the weight of his own shame and sin.

One evening, against the wishes of his frightened wife, young Puritan Goodman Brown embarks on a mysterious errand that leads him through the skeletal woods to a Black Mass being held by his fellow townsmen. His life forever changed by contact with the evil congregation. And his horror is amplified by the attendance of one participant in whom he had placed his greatest trust.

In the mid 1800s, Pyncheon is still a revered namesake in Salem, with the gloomy Pyncheon mansion serving as a stark reminder of the family's upper class history. However, the house - unique for its seven gables - has a dark and deadly past. Its current occupant, the older and unmarried Hepzibah Pyncheon, is all but destitute and unwilling to accept any assistance from her wealthy but unrelenting cousin, Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon.

The House of the Seven Gables is a fixture in Salem - and seemingly fixed in time. As the ancestral home of the Pyncheon family, its current mistress is Hepzibah Pyncheon, who has retreated behind a wall of false gentility. But into these dreary surroundings comes Phoebe, a country cousin whose youthful energy and sense of romance bring renewed life to the family.

In this series we listen to short stories that are NOT by perhaps the most well-known author of this type. But the many other rich talents in the volume may have treated the subject matter a little differently, or were perhaps just overlooked in the stampede to applaud the winner, but these authors are of equal merit. Each of their works is laden with talent, has purpose, and is rich and textured in this gloried niche of literature.

Set in 17th-century Puritan Massachusetts, The Scarlet Letter tells the haunting story of Hester Prynne, a woman condemned to wear a scarlet "A" for committing adultery. As Hester endures shame and isolation, she raises her daughter Pearl and protects the identity of the child’s father, the respected Reverend Dimmesdale.

At the heart of Dark Romanticism is its brooding, pessimistic tone, its emphasis on the supernatural and the sins of humanity, and its use of iconic symbols and horrifying imagery. The classic Dark Romantic authors (Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville) are represented in the stories and poems in this volume, as well as some authors who are not commonly included in this genre.

This collection of short stories contains several gothic tales to bear macabre and chilling witness to writers as diverse as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Elizabeth Gaskell, Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and Edith Nesbit. These tales are designed to unsettle you, just a little, while you sit back and take in their words as they lead you on a walk to places you’d perhaps rather not visit on your own. Our stories are "The Wedding Knell" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Old Nurse's Story" by Elizabeth Gaskell, and more.

Nathaniel Hawthorne masterfully grabs the imagination of children with these timeless tales of adventure based on the incomparable Greek mythological heroes' escapades. The stories included are: "The Wayside", "The Minotaurs", "The Pygmies", "The Dragon's Teeth", "Circe's Palace", "The Pomegranate Seeds", and "The Golden Fleece".

The inevitable is understood by each and every one of us who faces the final calling. So too are the effects on those left behind. The memories are there but the empty space, the void can never be refilled. It remains a dark, unreliable pit of loneliness. The sadness and often depression, the lack of will to continue may swamp us all. Unquenchable, undeniable. But loss can, after mourning, give the opportunity to reappraise the lost and how we can each move forward. In the literary world an accessible balance can be given.

This book contains the following works: 1. Edgar Allan Poe: The Pit and the Pendulum 2. William Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream 3. Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Secret Garden 4. Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man 5. Robert Louis Stevenson: Treasure Island 6. H. P. Lovecraft: At the Mountains of Madness 7. Jack London: The Call of the Wild 8. Mary W. Shelley: Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus 9. Osamu Dazai: No Longer Human (Confessions of a Faulty Man) 10. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter

In a sleepy little New England village stands a dark, weather-beaten, many-gabled house. This brooding mansion is haunted by a centuries-old curse that casts the shadow of ancestral sin upon the last four members of the distinctive Pyncheon family of Salem.

The story opens in Puritan Boston, a settlement only fifteen or twenty years old. A young woman stands on a scaffold clasping a three-month-old baby. As a married woman with a missing husband and a new baby, Hester Prynne could have been sentenced to death for the crime of adultery. Instead she is condemned to always wear the letter A as a badge of her shame. As she stands there, she sees her long-missing husband, who has been held captive by Indians.

Diplomacy by other means may, at times, sound heroic. A fight for principles and ideals carried out by young men armed to the teeth and directed by older men in pursuit of their own version of glory for themselves and their Nations. Right will triumph over wrong. But war can be an illusion, stirred up by schemers and opportunists to take something from other nations that may or may not be right. As blood and limb are sacrificed the true cost is seen but often set to one side as the dispute becomes embedded in emotions and reason falls away.

Wakefield was a mild-mannered man of no particular energy or imagination. The only fault his wife could find with him was that he had a tendency to be secretive about small things and perhaps a little selfish. Still, there was no hint that on the day he left for a short journey, his plan was to take a room in the next street and spy on his wife. He would not return for two decades.

The Scarlet Letter is generally considered to be Nathaniel Hawthorne’s masterpiece. Set in 17th-century Boston, it follows the plight of Hester Prynne, a young woman who bears a child out of wedlock, refuses to name the father, and is condemned to wear a scarlet "A" for the rest of her life. With The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne reaches back to America’s Puritan roots to probe themes of lust, sin, guilt, and redemption. This Essential Classics edition includes a new introduction by Professor Vivian Heller, PhD, in literature and modern studies from Yale University.

The relentless curse on the Pynchon family of Salem, Massachusetts, which has inhabited the House of the Seven Gables for generations, is resurrected two centuries later by their descendants - with surprising results.