After graduating, he went back to his home in Salem, where he resided for many years, leading a life of seclusion, which he passed in meditation and study.  His strong literary inclination now vented itself in efforts which were in every way characteristic of the man.  He wrote numerous wild tales, the most of which he burned, but a few of which found their way into the newspapers and magazines of the country.  They were full of a wild gloominess, and were told with a power which proved that their author was no ordinary man.  Few, however, dreamed that they were the work of the pale recluse of Salem, for he led a life of such strict seclusion that not even the members of his own family could tell with certainty what he did.  His days were passed in his chamber, and at night he took long walks alone on the sea-shore or into the woods.  He shunned all society, and seemed to find companionship only in nature, and in the creations of his fancy.  Yet he was not a morose or unhappy man.  On the contrary, he seems to have been a very happy one, full of generous and kindly feelings, and finding only a strange pleasure where others would have found bitterness and cynicism.  Like the melancholy Jacques, he might have said of his pensive shyness, “It is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects; ... which, by often rumination, wraps me in a most humorous sadness.”

In 1837 he collected his published tales, which, while they had charmed a few cultivated readers, had scarcely been noticed by the masses, and published them in a volume to which he gave the name of “Twice-Told Tales.”  The book was well received by the public, but its circulation was limited, although Mr. Longfellow warmly welcomed it in the “North American Review,” and pronounced it the “work of a man of genius and a true poet.”  Still it was neglected by the masses, and Hawthorne says himself that he was at that time “the most unknown author in America.”  There was more truth in this assertion than lies on its face, for the people who read the book supposed that the name of Nathaniel Hawthorne was merely a pseudonyme, and declared that as Nathaniel was evidently selected by the author because of the fondness of the old-time Puritans for Scripture names, so Hawthorne was chosen by him as expressive of one of the most beautiful features of the New England landscape.  The merits of the book were too genuine, however, for it to lack admirers, and the small class which greeted its first appearance with delight gradually increased, and finally the demand for the book became so great that in 1842 Hawthorne ventured to issue a second series of “Twice-Told Tales,” the most of which had appeared in the “Democratic Review,” then edited by his friend O’Sullivan.  Of these volumes, Mr. George William Curtis says:  “They are full of glancing wit, of tender satire, of exquisite natural description, of subtle and strange analysis of human life, darkly passionate and weird.”