The Portable Hawthorne by Nathaniel Hawthorne
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This ia a very good compendium of Hawthorne's writing, the largest selection is a complete "Scarlet Letter". Commentary from the editor Malcolm Crowley is light and unobtrusive yet insightful. Hawthorne could be so heavy-handed in his largely nationalist/Christian/righteous metaphor and this can get tiring (as in "The Grey Champion" or "The Scarlet Letter"), but in small doses this book is a wonderfully entertaining collection of top-notch writing. I find Hawthorne at his best unmoored from his principles and exploring witchcraft, evil and the other darker imaginings as in "Feathertop", "The Marble Faun" (only in excerpt here) and even "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" (1832) which over time has lost its overt nationalism.
Other treats here include his European travel observations and notebooks of stories written and never written.
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