The Snow Image and Other Stories of the Supernatural

Introduction by Richard Dalby

This volume presents the best of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short supernatural fiction in thirty-three stories from 'The Hollow of the Three Hills' (1830) to 'The Ghost of Doctor Harris' (1856). One of the giants of nineteenth-century American literature-author of the classic novel The Scarlet Letter-Hawthorne was brought up in Puritan New England. His strictly supervised childhood and vivid imagination created his lifelong fixation with the 'unpardonable sin', the darkness of the human mind and the uncertain shadowlands of the soul. Hawthorne's reputation as a short story writer was cemented with the publication of Twice-Told Tales in March 1837. Edgar Allan Poe acclaimed an expanded, 1842 edition of the book as belonging 'to the highest region of Art', and added: 'Mr Hawthorne's distinctive trait is invention, creation, imagination, originality-a trait which, in the literature of fiction, is positively worth all the rest. Mr Hawthorne is original at all points.'

Contents: 'Introduction' by Richard Dalby, 'The Hollow of the Three Hills', 'Roger Malvin's Burial', 'Mr Higginbotham's Catastrophe', 'The Grey Champion', 'Young Goodman Brown', ''The White Old Maid', 'Alice Doane's Appeal', 'A Visit to the Clerk of the Weather', 'The Minister's Black Veil', 'Dr Heidegger's Experiment', 'Fancy's Show Box', ''The Great Carbuncle', 'The Prophetic Pictures', 'The Man of Adamant', 'The Sister Years', 'Edward Randolph's Portrait', 'Howe's Masquerade', 'Lady Eleanore's Mantle', 'A Select Party', 'A Virtuoso's Collection', 'The Antique Ring', 'The Hall of Fantasy', 'The New Adam and Eve', 'The Birthmark', 'Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent', 'The Celestial Railroad', 'The Christmas Banquet', 'Rappaccini's Daughter', 'P's Correspondence', 'Ethan Brand', 'The Snow-Image', 'Feathertop', 'The Ghost of Doctor Harris'.

Limited to 300 copies