Calling the period in which he wrote “Ethan Brand,” “Main-street,” The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Romance Hawthorne's “major phase” may have the effect of the slighting the period from 1825 to 1838 in which, not counting the works he may have destroyed, he wrote more than sixty separate tales and sketches, some of them among the best and most durable in the language. “Roger Malvin's Burial,” “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” “The Gentle Boy” at the outset, “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Minister's Black Veil” just after that; and at the end the four “Legends of the Province House” all defy critical comparison and, supported by a redundancy of other thoughtful and skillfully short works, would make Hawthorne a major American writer if he had died in 1838. Or gone into the stagecoach business with his uncles. But the period is unquestionably major in terms of its high-energy output, and in comparison to the scattering of works that came later. Even though some of the later works have significant merit.

Biographers love the Notebooks, from England and then from France and Italy, and indeed they are more revealing than those written earlier in America, which consist mostly of un-philosophized observations and ideas for stories. These got published in the later 1860s, under the watchful eye of his wife, and they created something of a stir at the time; but no one has ever made the claim, familiar enough in the case of Emerson and Thoreau, that these “Journals” are the prime literary product. Hawthorne's métier is reflection, then dramatization— and not what his one-time Concord neighbor called “consciousness”; nor did he ever imagine himself as offering, anywhere, what Thoreau famously demanded in the opening of Walden, “a simple and sincere account of his own life.” Quod scripsi, scripsi, the public works all seem to declare: read them all and then you’ll know the real me, as much as any such thing is indeed possible. As if he were to say, when I go looking for myself, I find always some fictive premise.