Works

Early in the planning of this “Centenary Edition”, the editors decided to set aside a final volume for those works of Hawthorne that did not find a place in the previous volumes. Many of these works were written early in Hawthorne’s career, going back as far as his precollege years, and from the still hazily understood time of his earliest periodical publications - sometimes pseudonymous, more often anonymous. “The Life of Franklin Pierce” - which did not belong with the “romances”, however loud the satirical charges of political opponents that it did - finds its place in this volume, along with the first complete publication of Pierce’s Mexican diary, which Hawthorne used in composing his “Life”. During the 20th century, the many years of collecting Hawthorne’s letters made possible discoveries of forgotten reviews and theatrical notices; the arrival in research libraries of some of his wife’s later diaries and letters revealed the existence of a short essay in an ephemeral Concord publication of the Civil War years.Most prominent, perhaps, was the exciting recovery in 1977 of the earliest known notebook, of 1835-41, found in a piece of furniture taken as far from Salem as Boulder, Colorado. Claude M. Simpson and L. Neal Smith began the process of editing this volume in the early 1970s. After Simpson’s death in 1976, Smith turned his efforts to the French and Italian Notebooks and the Letters before his retirement in 1982. Now, with those volumes publsihed and the English Notebooks nearing editorial completion under the direction of Thomas Woodson, this “miscellany volume” is ready for publication. Contents include early poems, juvenile prose, biographical sketches, the lost notebook, reviews, preface to edited volumes, “The Life of Franklin Pierce”, later sketches and poems, several recently recovered letters and Pierce’s Mexican diary.