SOURCE: Mathews, James W. “Hawthorne and the Periodical Tale: From Popular Lore to Art.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 68, no. 2 (1974): 149-62.

In the following essay, Mathews considers Nathaniel Hawthorne's awareness of the American magazine-reading public in composing his short stories.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's frustrations in publishing his first short stories have been amply documented by such early biographers as Lathrop and Bridge and by more recent scholars Nelson F. Adkins and Seymour Gross.¹ Their consensus is that most of Hawthorne's difficulty resulted from his necessity to utilize periodicals, with a resultant reduction of profit and prestige, rather than publishing in book form as he had initially planned. Influences on Hawthorne's choice of subject and theme have also been copiously studied² and quite recently Doubleday has synthesized the myriad testimony that Hawthorne wrote within the framework of the energetic literary nationalism of the early nineteenth century and related...