Surveying Hawthorne's entire career, from his earliest surviving stories through the romances left unfinished at his death, Frederick Crews defines the terms of Hawthorne's self-debate as revealed in his fiction. Hawthorne emerges from this study as a writer of acute psychological awareness.

In an Afterword written for this edition, Crews interrogates his own argument with characteristic unsparingness. He candidly reassesses the theoretical commitments behind his book, reflects on the path taken by Hawthorne criticism since 1966, and answers the question that many readers have asked of...

True skepticism is an attitude of constant questioning, a mode of thinking Frederick Crews held so dear he applied it to Freudian psychoanalytic theory, an intellectual tradition he initially believed to be empirically sound. But as his examination of the logical structure and institutional history of psychoanalysis revealed ever more cracks in the field's empirical framework, Crews broke with Freudian theory, eventually labeling it the very model of a modern pseudoscience.

This collection features essays chronicling his rejection of Freudian psychoanalysis and our recent recovered memory...