Barlowe, Jamie. The Scarlet Mob of Scribblers: Rereading Hester Prynne. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. Provocative feminist study that includes a very interesting analysis of The Scarlet Letter and the 1995 movie version of the novel.
Baym, Nina. “The Scarlet Letter”: A Reading. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Excellent introductory book on The Scarlet Letter by one of Hawthorne's best critics.
Baym, Nina. The Shape of Hawthorne's Career. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976. A groundbreaking study of Hawthorne when first published. Especially good insights into the role Hawthorne's women characters play in his major fiction.
Bell, Millicent, ed. New Essays on Hawthorne's Major Tales. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Includes five essays by well-known scholars, with attention to “Rappaccini's Daughter,” “The Minister's Black Veil,” “Ethan Brand,” “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” “Roger Malvin's Burial,” “The Celestial Railroad,” and “Young Goodman Brown.”
Bell, MillicentHawthorne and the Real: Bicentennial Essays. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005. Written in honor of Hawthorne's two-hundredth birthday, a dozen essays on various topics by prominent Hawthorne scholars.
Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Office of“The Scarlet Letter”. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Very influential study, exemplifying New Historicist cultural approach. Examines the novel in light of nineteenth-century politics and finds it to be in league with desires to “embrace gradualism and consensus” on issues such as slavery.
Berlant, Lauren. The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life. University of Chicago Press, 1991. Ranges between seventeenth- and nineteenth-century moments to explore Hawthorne's politics, particularly his representation of citizenship.
Brodhead, Richard. The School of Hawthorne. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Emphasis on Herman Melville, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and William Faulkner and their fictional responses to Hawthorne's example.
Budick, Emily Miller. Engendering Romance: Women Writers and the Hawthorne Tradition, 1850–1990. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Places Hawthorne at the head of a female tradition of romance writing that includes Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Toni Morrison, and Grace Paley (as well as Henry James and William Faulkner).
Buitenhuis, Peter. “The House of the Seven Gables”:Severing Family and Colonial Ties. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Good introductory study of Hawthorne's second novel.
Cain, William E., ed. The Blithedale Romance. A Bedford Cultural Edition. Boston: Bedford Books, 1996. Includes very useful background information on utopianism, as well as nineteenth-century political and economic theories.
Carton, Evan. “The Marble Faun”:Hawthorne's Transformations. New York: Twayne, 1992. Excellent introductory study of Hawthorne's last novel, emphasizing its engagement with nineteenth-century American issues.
Coale, Samuel Chase. In Hawthorne's Shadow: American Romance from Melville to Mailer. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985. Wide-ranging study of Hawthorne's influence on such twentieth-century writers as William Faulkner, William Styron, Flannery O'Connor, John Cheever, John Updike, Norman Mailer, and others.
Coale, Samuel Chase. Mesmerism and Hawthorne: Mediums of American Romance. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998. Useful account of Hawthorne's interest in and use of mesmerism in many of his works.
Colacurcio, Michael J.The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne's Early Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Meticulously studies Hawthorne's knowledge of historical sources in stories such as “Young Goodman Brown,” “The Minister's Black Veil,” “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” “Wakefield,” “Roger Malvin's Burial,” “The Gentle Boy,” and others.
Colacurcio, Michael J., ed. New Essays on “The Scarlet Letter”. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Includes four essays on the novel, including one by Colacurcio.
Crews, Frederick. The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. A provocative Freudian study of Hawthorne's writing; excellent psychoanalytic analyses of tales and novels.
Dauber, Kenneth. Rediscovering Hawthorne. Princeton University Press, 1977. Emphasizes Hawthorne's poetics, discounting his “visionary” tendencies, in favor of a structuralist approach that discovers stories layered one upon the other.
Davis, Clark. Hawthorne's Shyness: Ethics, Politics, and the Question of Engagement. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. In contrast to recent studies critical of Hawthorne's politics, emphasizes Hawthorne's engagement – and complex depiction of engagement – with ethical questions.
DeSalvo, Louise. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1987. An important feminist study critical of Hawthorne's attitudes toward women.
Easton, Alison. The Making of the Hawthorne Subject. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996. Especially valuable study of Hawthorne's early development as a writer and his efforts to devise a viable authorial “self.”
Erlich, Gloria C.Family Themes and Hawthorne's Fiction: The Tenacious Web. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984. Part biography, part criticism. Emphasizes Hawthorne's early childhood experiences and three themes: maternal deprivation, paternal loss, and domination by stepfather figures.
Gale, Robert L.A Nathaniel Hawthorne Encyclopedia. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991. Very important reference source. Includes detailed entries on just about everything a reader might think of asking about.
Herbert, T. Walter. Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Provocative family biography that portrays Hawthorne and his wife as victims of nineteenth-century separate spheres ideologies that in turn victimize their children. Keys each of four sections to one of the major romances.
Hutner, Gordon. Secrets and Sympathy: Forms of Disclosure in Hawthorne's Novels. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988. Sympathy enables characters to cross the boundary between themselves and ourselves and so achieve understanding and knowledge.
Idol, John L. Jr., and Ponder, Melinda, eds. Hawthorne and Women: Engendering and Expanding the Hawthorne Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. Important collection of essays on Hawthorne's relationship to certain women, as well as on his influence on many women writers.
Idol, John L. Jr., and Jones, Buford, eds. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Contemporary Reviews. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Very good, although not complete, collection of early reviews of Hawthorne's publications.
Johnson, Claudia Durst, ed. Understanding “The Scarlet Letter”: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents. Westport: Greenwood, 1995. Includes excerpts from seventeenth-century, nineteenth-century, and even twentieth-century documents to aid readers in developing various historical contexts for understanding the novel.
Kesterson, David B., ed. Critical Essays on Hawthorne's“The Scarlet Letter”. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. Good collection of previously published essays.
Laffrado, Laura. Hawthorne's Literature for Children. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. The only book-length study of Hawthorne's several collections of tales for children.
Leverenz, David. Manhood and the American Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. Very important study of nineteenth-century American literature and its engagement with questions about manhood. Includes two insightful chapters on Hawthorne.
Levine, Robert S., ed. The House of the Seven Gables. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. Norton Critical Edition includes many important essays and background information on the novel.
Luedtke, Luther S.Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Romance of the Orient. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Fascinating study emphasizing Hawthorne's knowledge of Oriental history and culture – his knowledge of The Arabian Nights, for example.
McWilliams, John P. Jr.Hawthorne, Melville, and the American Character: A Looking-Glass Business. Cambridge University Press, 1984. Demonstrates connections in Hawthorne's fiction among seventeenth-century, eighteenth-century, and nineteenth-century moments in American history.
Martin, Terence. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Revised Edition. Boston: Twayne, 1983. Excellent introduction to Hawthorne's major works.
Mellow, James R.Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. The most comprehensive Hawthorne biography, with detailed treatment of many important events in Hawthorne's life.
Miller, Edwin Haviland. Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991. Biographical study that sees Hawthorne as a “gentle boy” anxious about his sexuality and his manliness. Provocative speculations on the homoerotic dimensions of Hawthorne's friendship with Melville.
Miller, J. Hillis. Hawthorne and History: Defacing It. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Focuses on “The Minister's Black Veil” and the theory of history and historical knowledge that may be inferred from it. Concludes that all signs are potentially unreadable, or that the reading of them is potentially unverifiable.
Millington, Richard H.Practicing Romance: Narrative Form and Cultural Engagement in Hawthorne's Fiction. Princeton University Press, 1992. Synthesizes Freudian psychoanalysis, New Historicism, reader-response theory, and other critical methodologies to examine the interplay of individual and society in Hawthorne's fiction.
Millington, Richard H., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Cambridge University Press, 2004. Excellent collection of a dozen topical essays by prominent scholars, each of them coming at Hawthorne from a different cultural angle.
Mitchell, Thomas R.Hawthorne's Fuller Mystery. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. Very provocative book that argues for Margaret Fuller's influence on Hawthorne and his writing. Sees Fuller in “Rappaccini's Daughter” and in the four novels.
Moore, Margaret B.The Salem World of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998. Biographical study of Hawthorne's Salem background.
Newman, Lea Bertani Vozar. A Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979. A still useful survey of criticism on every one of Hawthorne's short works.
Person, Leland S.Aesthetic Headaches: Women and a Masculine Poetics in Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988. Includes three chapters on Hawthorne's major women characters.
Person, Leland S., ed. “The Scarlet Letter” and Other Writings. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. Norton Critical Edition includes many important essays on the novel and on selected shorter works.
Pfister, Joel. The Production of Personal Life: Class, Gender, and the Psychological in Hawthorne's Fiction. Stanford University Press, 1991. Historicizes Hawthornian psychology by focusing on the intersection of gender and class (especially new middle-class domestic values) in Hawthorne's fiction.
Reynolds, Larry J., ed. A Historical Guide to Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Four essays situate Hawthorne's writing in relation to mesmerism, the visual arts, changing ideas about child-rearing, and the slavery question.
Rosenthal, Bernard, ed. Critical Essays on Hawthorne's“The House of the Seven Gables”. New York: G. K. Hall, 1995. Excellent collection of previously published essays.
Scharnhorst, Gary, ed. The Critical Response to Nathaniel Hawthorne's“The Scarlet Letter”. Westport: Greenwood, 1992. Very useful collection of reviews, especially nineteenth-century reviews of Hawthorne's most famous novel.
Schiff, James. Updike's Version: Rewriting“The Scarlet Letter”. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992. Excellent study of John Updike's three “scarlet letter” novels, A Month of Sundays, Roger's Version, and S.
Thompson, G. R.The Art of Authorial Presence: Hawthorne's Provincial Tales. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Considers Hawthorne a crafty manipulator of narrative voice in eight early tales, including “Alice Doane's Appeal,” “Roger Malvin's Burial,” “The Gentle Boy,” and “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.”
Turner, Arlin. Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Excellent biography.
Frank, Albert J., ed. Critical Essays on Hawthorne's Short Stories. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991. Good collection of previously published essays.
Wilson, James C.The Hawthorne and Melville Friendship: An Annotated Bibliography, Biographical and Critical Essays, and Correspondence Between the Two. Jefferson: McFarland, 1991. Good collection of documents and early critical studies of the Hawthorne–Melville relationship.
Wineapple, Brenda. Hawthorne: A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Excellent recent biography, especially good on Hawthorne's attitudes toward race, slavery, and abolition.
