/lit/ - Literature

Read "My Kinsman, Major Molineux":

http://www.hawthorneinsalem.org/mirror_eldritch/mm.html

>>21481632
OP I took a Hawthorne and Melville class for graduate school a few years ago and had the exact same experience as you. I was blown away by how good The Scarlet Letter is. It's a book that's wasted on high schoolers. You need to read it after you've lived a little, after you've done and seen some things, and you can empathize with the struggles of all the characters, including the villainy of Chillingworth.

Not to mention the prologue is very amusing and sets the stage for the entire story. Hawthorne is very consciously echoing Dante in the beginning, and he uses symbolism and allegory in the novel in a very Dantean way.

It's a brilliant novel. Hawthorne is brilliant in general and everything he wrote should be written.

Someone else mentioned Hawthorne and he really is the ultimate New England fiction writer. He's actually extremely underrated. Everyone was forced to read The Scarlet Letter in high school and developed a bias against him, but he's one of the greatest writers in American history.

Start with his Tales.

>>20358337
This is a huge reason. The book is assigned as high school reading when it absolutely should not be. High schoolers are too stupid for Hawthorne. I reread the book in graduate school as part of a Hawthorne/Melville class and I fell in love with it. It's great.

It's particularly cool when you know that Hawthorne was probably heavily influenced by Dante and the Divine Comedy. The way Hawthorne plays around with the idea of Symbol, of characters simultaneously being fully-fleshed out people and also symbols of something else, is pure Dante. Hawthorne was good friends with Longfellow and so would have been aware of the attempts to translate the Comedy into English. Hawthorne himself could read Italian so he could have read Dante in the original.

The intro to The Scarlet Letter is also very Dante-esque.

I bounce back and forth between "The Pool of the Black One," which is one of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, and "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," which is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tales. I'd say they're my top two. It all depends on if I'm a fantastical mood or a more realistic mood. Although "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" does have a somewhat fantastical feeling to it.

I've always thought "Young Goodman Brown" by Nathaniel Hawthorne was a pretty fall-ish story, since it takes place in the woods and it deals with spooky shit.

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/english/f1124y-001/resources/Young_Goodman_Brown.pdf

Really, a lot of Hawthorne's short stories feel very autumnal to me.

Many of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tales are very creepy, even if they do not have an overt supernatural element.

In particular, I would highly recommend, "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," which is a fantastic creepy story and feels very Halloween-ish.

I am a Catholic so I will keep my opinions on the United States to myself.

But if you wish some literature about it, read Hawthorne. Read Hawthorne's tales. They will teach you about the Puritans, about all the myths surrounding them.

Why does everyone, from American high schoolers to Yuropoors, hate Hawthorne?

Why does everyone hate Hawthorne?

>Mods deleted my Hawthorne thread twice
Do mods hate Hawthorne or something? What's the deal? Why are they never here to delete the Nazi threads when they pop up? Like what the fuck?

Anyway Hawthorne thread, again.

Nathaniel Hawthorne thread. Is this guy actually good or is he high school English class tier? I have been avoiding him because he kind of gave off that vibe but I recently learned that Henry James praised him so now I am curious about him.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

What do you think of him? Should I read him? If so, what work of his do you recommend?

Taking a class on pre-civil war literature and the first writer that we are studying is Nathanial Hawthorne. As someone who loves Poe, Melville, Emerson, and Thoreau, I haven't decided how I feel about his writing. Your thoughts /lit/?