A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1851) is a children's book by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne in which he retells several Greek myths. It was followed by a sequel, Tanglewood Tales .
A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1851) is a children's book by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne in which he retells several Greek myths. It was followed by a sequel, Tanglewood Tales .
The stories in A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys are all stories within a story. The frame story is that Eustace Bright, a Williams College student, is telling these tales to a group of children at Tanglewood, an area in Lenox, Massachusetts, where Hawthorne lived for a time. All the tales are modified versions of ancient Greek myths:
Hawthorne expressed his idea to rewrite Greek myths as early as 1846 when he outlined a book to Evert Augustus Duyckinck of stories "taken out of the cold moonshine of classical mythology, and modernized, or perhaps gothicized, so that they may be felt by children of these days." [1] In 1851, just after the birth of his daughter Rose, he proposed the idea again in the form of a collection of six tales. His aim would be, he wrote, "substituting a tone in some degree Gothic or romantic, or any such tone as may please myself, instead of the classic coldness, which is as repellent as the touch of marble... and, of course, I shall purge out all the old heathen wickedness, and put in a moral wherever practicable." [1]
Publisher James Thomas Fields pushed for Hawthorne to complete the project quickly. Fields had begun reissuing the author's earlier series for children titled Grandfather's Child, originally published by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and now renamed True Stories from History and Biography, and was also planning a new edition of Twice-Told Tales . [2] The entirety of the collection was written between June and mid-July 1851. He sent the final manuscript to Fields on July 15 and wrote: "I am going to begin to enjoy the summer now and to read foolish novels, if I can get any, and smoke cigars and think of nothing at all — which is equivalent to thinking of all manner of things." [3]
The Hawthornes had moved to The Berkshires shortly after the publication of The Scarlet Letter and it was here that he completed not only A Wonder-Book but also his novel The House of the Seven Gables . [4] He was able to spend time with several other literary figures, including Herman Melville, who was then living at Arrowhead in Pittsfield. Melville is referenced by name in A Wonder-Book: "On the higher side of Pittsfield, sits Herman Melville, shaping out the gigantic conception of his 'White Whale' while the gigantic shape of Graylock [ sic ] looms upon him from his study-window." [5] Biographer Philip McFarland called this period "by far the most productive creative period of Hawthorne's life", though it also marked the end of his time as a writer of short tales. [6] The Hawthornes would soon move temporarily to West Newton, Massachusetts, where the author would begin to write The Blithedale Romance , a novel he conceived while in Lenox. [7]
A later edition from 1922 was illustrated by Arthur Rackham.
Hawthorne wrote A Wonder-Book immediately after The House of the Seven Gables. That novel had sold 6,710 copies by August 1851, and A Wonder-Book sold 4,667 copies in just two months after its November 1851 publication. [8] By comparison, his friend Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick was released the same month, with the British edition selling under 300 copies in two years, and the American edition under 1,800 in the first year. [9] Hawthorne later authorized a French edition of A Wonder-Book and bought a copy in Marseille while on a European vacation in 1859. He joked in his journal about the purchase of "the two volumes of the Livre des Merveilles, by a certain author of my acquaintance." [10]
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer. His works often focus on history, morality, and religion.
In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Baucis and Philemon, were an old married couple in the region of Tyana, which Ovid places in Phrygia, and the only ones in their town to welcome disguised gods Zeus and Hermes, thus embodying the pious exercise of hospitality, the ritualized guest-friendship termed xenia, or theoxenia when a god was involved.
Fanshawe is a novel written by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. It was his first published work, which he published anonymously in 1828.
Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, OP, also known as Mother Mary Alphonsa, was an American Dominican, writer, social worker, and foundress of the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne.
The Marble Faun: Or, The Romance of Monte Beni, also known by the British title Transformation, was the last of the four major romances by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and was published in 1860. The Marble Faun, written on the eve of the American Civil War, is set in a fantastical Italy. The romance mixes elements of a fable, pastoral, gothic novel, and travel guide.
Tanglewood Tales for Boys and Girls (1853) is a book by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne, a sequel to A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys. It is a re-writing of well-known Greek myths in a volume for children.
Julian Hawthorne was an American writer and journalist, the son of novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody. He wrote numerous poems, novels, short stories, mysteries and detective fiction, essays, travel books, biographies, and histories.
The House of the Seven Gables: A Romance is a Gothic novel written beginning in mid-1850 by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne and published in April 1851 by Ticknor and Fields of Boston. The novel follows a New England family and their ancestral home. In the book, Hawthorne explores themes of guilt, retribution, and atonement, and colors the tale with suggestions of the supernatural and witchcraft. The setting for the book was inspired by the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion, a gabled house in Salem, Massachusetts, belonging to Hawthorne's cousin Susanna Ingersoll, as well as ancestors of Hawthorne who had played a part in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. The book was well received upon publication and later had a strong influence on the work of H. P. Lovecraft. The House of the Seven Gables has been adapted several times to film and television.
"Feathertop" is a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, first published in 1852. The moral tale uses a metaphoric scarecrow named Feathertop and its adventure to offer the reader a conclusive lesson about human character. It has since been used and adapted in several other media forms, such as opera and theatre.
"The Ambitious Guest" is a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne. First published in The New-England Magazine in June 1835, it was republished in the second volume of Twice-Told Tales in 1841.
"The Great Carbuncle" is a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne. It first appeared in December 1835 before being included in the collection Twice-Told Tales in 1837.
"The Man of Adamant" is a short story written by Nathaniel Hawthorne. It was first published in the 1837 edition of The Token and Atlantic Souvenir, edited by Samuel Griswold Goodrich. It later appeared in Hawthorne's final collection of short stories The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales, published in 1852 by Ticknor, Reed & Fields.
"Egotism; or, The Bosom-Serpent" is a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne published in 1843 in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review in New York.
"Roger Malvin's Burial" is a short story by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. It was first published anonymously in 1832 before its inclusion in the 1846 collection Mosses from an Old Manse. The tale concerns two fictional colonial survivors returning home after the historical battle known as Battle of Pequawket.
Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea is a prose collection by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It was the first major work by Longfellow and it was inspired by his travels in Europe as a young man. The term "outre-mer" is French for "overseas".
"The Celestial Railroad" is short story by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. In the allegorical tale, Hawthorne adopts the style and content of the seventeenth-century allegory The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan. Where Bunyan's tale portrays a Christian's spiritual "journey" through life, Hawthorne's satirizes many contemporary religious practices and philosophies, including transcendentalism.
The New-England Magazine was a monthly literary magazine published in Boston, Massachusetts, from 1831 to 1835.
The National Era was an abolitionist newspaper published weekly in Washington, D.C., from 1847 to 1860. Gamaliel Bailey was its editor in its first year. The National Era Prospectus stated in 1847:
While due attention will be paid to Current Events, Congressional Proceedings, General Politics and Literature, the great aim of the paper will be a complete discussion of the Question of Slavery, and an exhibition of the Duties of the Citizen in relation to it; especially will it explain and advocate the leading Principles and Measures of the Liberty Party, seeking to do this, not in the spirit of the Party, but in the love of Truth—not for the triumph of Party, but for the establishment of Truth.
"The Great Stone Face" is a short story published by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1850. The story reappeared in a full-length book, The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales, published by Ticknor, Reed & Fields in 1852. It has since been republished and anthologized many times.
Media related to A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys at Wikimedia Commons
The full text of A Wonder Book at Wikisource
A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys public domain audiobook at LibriVox 