With their fluent colloquial prose and curiosity about life's spectacle, Hawthorne's voluminous notebooks belie the common notion that temperament and talent led him to write works of allegorical romance rather than realism. The essay argues that Hawthorne cultivated romance not because he believed in its idealizing vision but rather because, extrapolating from his experience of “the real,” he didn't.

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© 2008 by The New England Quarterly
2008