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Attention, students who are tired of being assigned the latest LGBTQ or woke piece of propaganda that passes as “literature” in high schools, community colleges, and “universities”:
Want to read some great literature by people who wrote substantial paragraphs and sentences which challenge your mind, in short, books written by DEAD WHITE MALES?
I highly recommend this 1,223 page anthology of works by one of the greatest American authors as a counter to the usual agitprop which is shoved down your throats by “professors” who want to indoctrinate you more than have you develop critical thinking skills or appreciate high-register vocabulary and writing.
Even though he falls into the category of “dead white male”, the fact that Hawthorne’s works are “dated” is overcome by the stronger fact that his topics have universal appeal and, often, a life-affirming value.
For instance, everybody knows that Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is a life-affirming novel of a mother who could have either aborted the child conceived in adultery or given birth to her and then left her to die, infanticide being a common practice of women who wanted to avoid the shame of illicit sexual activity in earlier centuries. Thus, Hawthorne should be credited with having written the first great work of prolife fiction in the United States.
Similarly, students of literature and the general reading public will appreciate how infanticide (killing newborn babies) is addressed in the short story “The Hollow of the Three Hills”, wherein is recounted the remorse of “the mother who had sinned against natural affection, and left her child to die” (944).
Of course, Hawthorne’s Protestant hatred of the Catholic Church can get in the way of appreciating an otherwise interesting story; this anti-Catholic bigotry occurs the most in the tedious novel The Marble Faun, especially when Hilda comes close to converting to Catholicism. Not even Hawthorne, however, can prevent Hilda from rejoicing over the Sacrament of Penance in which she finds such great release from what she thinks is guilt over having witnessed a murder (chapter 39, 793ff).
Caution: Hawthorne’s style is a challenge for an American reading public which may be ignorant because of ridiculously feeble public school education. For example, his frequent use of embedded dependent clauses in long compound-complex sentence structures, sometimes running the length of a paragraph, could turn off many contemporary readers who are used to simple sentence structures of one independent clause, clauses themselves having few words. This challenge to understanding his syntax, however, becomes easier to resolve as one becomes accustomed to identifying the subject of a sentence and how many verbs or direct objects of those verbs that Hawthorne intends.
A second caution is that contemporary readers should spend at least a month reading the anthology. Doing so will immerse them into an education that they will not obtain in exorbitant (and feeble) American colleges.