Includes bibliographical references and index.

On Nathaniel Hawthorne / Jack Lynch -- Biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne / Frank Day -- The Paris review perspective / Elaine Blair -- Nathaniel Hawthorne and the canon of American literature / Bridget M. Marshall -- Nathaniel Hawthorne's critical reception / Matthew J. Bolton -- The burden of secret sin: Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction / Margarita Georgieva -- Nathaniel Hawthorne and American romanticism / Jennifer Banach Palladino -- The scarlet letter / Hugo McPherson -- Chiefly about Coverdale: The Blithedale romance / Clark Davis -- Re-figuring revelations: Nathaniel Hawthorne's The scarlet letter / Evans Lansing Smith -- Hawthorne as essayist: Our old home and "Chiefly about war matters" / Thomas R. Moore -- "A small heap of glittering fragments": Hawthorne's discontent with the short story form / Kathryn B. McKee -- Hawthorne and nineteenth-century perfectionism / Claudia D. Johnson -- Progress and providence in The house of the seven gables / John Gatta, Jr. -- Narrative techniques and the oral tradition in The scarlet letter / John G. Bayer -- Hawthorne and the sublime / Leo B. Levy -- Hawthorne, the fall, and the psychology of maturity / Melvin W. Askew -- Nathaniel Hawthorne and his mother: a biographical speculation / Nina Baym -- Agnostic tensions in Hawthorne's short stories / Bill Christopherson.