"I mean to write the Story of Midas, with his Golden Touch, Pandora's Box, The Adventure of Hercules in quest of the Golden Apples, Bellerophon and the ChimAEra, Baucis and Philemon, Perseus and Medusa; these, I think, will be enough to make up a volume. As a framework, I shall have a young college-student telling these stories to his cousins and brothers and sisters, during his vacations, sometimes in the woods and dells. Unless I greatly mistake, these old fictions will work up admirably for the purpose; and I shall aim at substituting a tone in some degree Gothic or romantic, or any...

Hawthorne's first Wonder Book was so well received that he was induced to undertake another within eighteen months from the time of finishing the first. To this new volume, made up in the same way of Greek myths retold with a modern, free, half-realistic and half-fanciful tone, he gave the name Tanglewood Tales. The previous series having been ostensibly narrated by one Eustace Bright, among the hills of Berkshire, these additional stories in the like vein were represented as having been brought by Eustace Bright to Hawthorne. -- from George Parsons Lathrop's Introduction