Twice-Told Tales

Twice Told Tales is a collection of short fiction and sketches by Nathaniel Hawthorne, first published in 1837 and expanded in 1842. It was the book that made Hawthorne’s reputation as a writer of short fiction and that the young Edgar Allan Poe reviewed in the famous essay where he laid out his theory of the unity of effect in the short story. The title comes from a line in Shakespeare’s King John and refers to the fact that most of the pieces had already appeared in various magazines and annuals during the previous decade.

The collection contains some of Hawthorne’s most enduring short pieces. There is The Minister’s Black Veil, the parable of a New England minister who one day appears in his pulpit wearing a black veil and refuses ever after to remove it. There is The Maypole of Merry Mount, the historical sketch of the conflict between the Puritan colony at Plymouth and the merrier settlement at Merry Mount. There is Wakefield, the strange short story of a London man who leaves his wife to live in a nearby street for twenty years without ever telling her where he is. There is The Gray Champion, the patriotic ghost story of a colonial figure who returns at moments of national crisis. There are also lighter sketches, including the gentle observational pieces about New England small town life that show Hawthorne in a different mood from the famous moral allegories.

What made the book important historically is that it gave American readers their first sustained example of a serious American short fiction writer working in his own voice. Hawthorne was drawing on New England history and on the moral tradition of New England Puritanism, but he was treating both as the material of fiction rather than as the material of sermon or political argument. The book established the territory that he would extend in Mosses from an Old Manse and that would lead eventually to The Scarlet Letter.

The collected Twice Told Tales runs about four hundred pages in the standard editions. For readers new to Hawthorne, this is one of the best places to begin, since the short pieces give the range of his interests in compact form. It pairs naturally with Mosses from an Old Manse, the companion volume of his shorter work, and with The Scarlet Letter when the reader is ready for the great novel.