Passages From the American Note-books

Passages from the American Note Books is the published version of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s personal journals from the years before his European service, covering the period from his early adult years through the late 1840s. The notebooks were published posthumously under the editorial supervision of his widow Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, and they represent one of the most valuable primary sources for understanding Hawthorne’s creative process and his daily life across the period when his major American fiction was being developed.

Hawthorne kept extensive personal notebooks across his life, recording daily observations, ideas for stories, reflections on people and places, sketches of scenes and characters that might find their way into fiction, and the kind of working notes that any serious writer accumulates. The American notebooks are particularly valuable because they document the period when Hawthorne was writing the major short fiction and the early novels that would establish his reputation.

Readers interested in how Hawthorne’s fiction grew out of his daily observation will find the American notebooks essential. Many of the elements that appear in his major short stories can be traced back to specific entries in the notebooks, where Hawthorne first recorded the observation, the character sketch, or the situation that would later become part of a finished piece. The notebooks show his creative process from the inside in ways that the polished fiction itself cannot reveal.

The published version was edited with the kind of family piety that the Victorian era expected, with modern scholarly editions providing fuller access to the original material. Even the edited version remains valuable as a primary source for understanding Hawthorne’s life and work.

For Hawthorne completists, for students of his creative process, or for readers interested in how nineteenth century American writers actually worked, Passages from the American Note Books is essential.