Early Hawthorne Forgotten

Biographical exposés, only faintly disguised through the legerdermain of psychoanalysis, feminist studies, and racial politics, interpreted a repeated number of Hawthorne's works not so much to illuminate the writings but the man who composed them. [...]we have Hawthorne the man who lacks confidence in himself as a writer; Hawthorne who doubts his manhood; Hawthorne who harbors unacknowledged homoerotic desires; Hawthorne who reveals a life-long attraction to and repulsion from homosexual experience initiated by a Manning uncle; Hawthorne who has an erotic fascination for Herman Melville or Maragret Fuller; and Hawthorne who, in addition to feeling dubious about the efficacy of civic reform movements generally, was a racist. [...]Hawthorne would not appear to have been a very happy guy. [...]roughly 75 works are generally unfamiliar to most readers, and I would guess that at least half of these cannot be recalled by title, let alone content, even by scholars who devote much of their professional attention to Hawthorne. [...]the following titles rarely ring a bell-"A Bell's Biography"-"My Visit to Niagara"-"The Village Uncle"-"Graves and Goblins"-"A Visit to the Clerk of the Weather"-"David Swan"-"Edward Fane's Rosebud"-"Peter Goldthwaite's Treasure"-"Chippings with a Chisel"-"Foot-prints on the Sea-shore"-"Snow-flakes"-"The Lily's Quest"-"An Antique Ring"- "The Old Apple-Dealer." Time forbids a brief review of additional lightsome tales, but worth mentioning are the frisky double entendres and happy endings of "Mr. Higgenbotham's Catastrophe" (1834) and "A Rill from the TownPump" (1835), the former concluding with the gossipy Dominicus Pike marrying the pretty and rich niece of Mr. Higgenbotham, the latter sporting...