Twice-Told Tales
1837
The collection that announced America's first great dark poet of the conscience. These thirty-eight stories crack open Puritan New England like a cracked mirror, revealing the rot behind the righteousness. In "Young Goodman Brown," a young husband walks into the forest to meet the devil and discovers his pastor and deacon already kneeling at the black mass. In "The Minister's Black Veil," a clergyman hides his face behind a scrap of black crepe, and no one dares ask why. Hawthorne writes with the cold clarity of a man dissecting his own sins, laying bare the guilt, hypocrisy, and secret corruption that haunt even the most upright souls. This is America before it learned to smile at its own darkness. The stories pulse with ghosts, moral terrors, and the terrible weight of what people hide from each other and themselves. For readers who want literature that unsettles.
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“Pleasant is a rainy winter's day, within doors! The best study for such a day, or the best amusement,”
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Thus from beneath the black veil there rolled a cloud into the sunshine, an ambiguity of sin or sorrow, which enveloped the poor minister, so that love or sympathy could never reach him.””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Perhaps a germ of love was springing in their hearts so pure that it might blossom in Paradise, since it could not be matured on earth;””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“I know what to think when a young girl shivers by a warm hearth and complains of lonesomeness at her mother's side. Shall I put these feelings into words?””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“I look around me, and, lo! on every visage a black veil!””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“All through life that piece of crape had hung between him and the world; it had separated him from cheerful brotherhood and woman's love and kept him in that saddest of all prisons his own heart;””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“I wonder he is not afraid to be alone with himself." "Men sometimes are so," said her husband.””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“The subject had reference to secret sin and those sad mysteries which we hide from our nearest and dearest, and would fain conceal from our own consciousness, even forgetting that the Omniscient can detect them.””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Yet perhaps the pale-faced congregation was almost as fearful a sight to the minister as his black veil to them.””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Twice-Told Tales. Lex, lex-books.com/book/twice-told-tales-6d26c9b0-d91c-48b7-9059-f066fb30244e.Hawthorne, N. (1837). Twice-Told Tales. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/twice-told-tales-6d26c9b0-d91c-48b7-9059-f066fb30244eHawthorne, Nathaniel. Twice-Told Tales. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/twice-told-tales-6d26c9b0-d91c-48b7-9059-f066fb30244e.
