Passages from the American Notebooks, Volume 2.
These are the private pages of America's master of the dark romantic tale, and they reveal a man remarkably different from the author of "The Scarlet Letter." Spanning 1835 to 1853, Hawthorne's journals capture him at his most unguarded: wrestling with cows at Brook Farm, watching the sunrise over Massachusetts meadows, questioning the utopian ideals he once embraced. Here is Hawthorne the farmer, the neighbor, the observer of small details that would later bloom into American masterpieces. His wit cuts sharper in these pages than in his polished fiction, his melancholy more raw. The entries from Brook Farm document his disillusionment with communal living, the gap between romantic ideology and the blisters on one's hands. Yet there is also profound beauty in these fragments, moments where the future author of "The House of the Seven Gables" finds allegory in a sunset or meaning in the rhythm of seasonal labor. For readers who have ever wanted to see behind the curtain of American literature's great enigmatic, these notebooks offer something rare: Hawthorne, uncomplicated by reputation, simply thinking on the page.
