Twice-Told Tales is a short story collection in two volumes by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The first was published in the spring of 1837, and the second in 1842. The stories had all been previously published in magazines and annuals, hence the name.

Dr. Heidegger's experiment -- The birthmark -- Ethan Brand -- Wakefield -- The great stone face -- The gray champion.

In a Puritan settlement in Boston in the mid 1600's, a woman named Hester Prynne committed adultery and had a child. The townspeople are outraged and they make her wear a scarlet "A" on her clothes for everyone to see. It is supposed to be a mark of shame, but since Hester is a master at needlework, she makes her "A" beautiful. Her husband, who was going to follow her after he had settled some affairs, sent her to Boston, but at least two years passed and he had still not shown up. While Hester is receiving some of her punishment by standing on a scaffold, she spots her husband in the crowd....

Main Street From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales"

From: "A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys" The Paradise of Children - recounts the story of Pandora opening the box filled with all of mankind's Troubles.

A snow girl made by a brother and sister magically comes to life, but melts and disappears when their no-nonsense father insists she is a real girl and brings her inside to the stove to warm up.

1652... Found guilty of adultery, Hester Prynne is punished by being forced to publicly wear the scarlet letter 'A' as a mark of her shame. Despite being imprisoned, Hester refuses to name her lover and father of her daughter. Her position becomes more desperate when a man calling himself Roger Chillingworth arrives in her cell... A story of guilt and revenge, Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel is rightly acclaimed as a literary classic, and its themes remain as challenging today as they were when the book was written.

Rappaccini's Daughter" is a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne first published in the December 1844 issue of The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, and later in the 1846 collection Mosses from an Old Manse. It is about Giacomo Rappaccini, a medical researcher in medieval Padua who grows a garden of poisonous plants. He brings up his daughter to tend the plants, and she becomes resistant to the poisons, but in the process she herself becomes poisonous to others. The traditional story of a poisonous maiden has been traced back to India, and Hawthorne's version has been adopted in...

In a sleepy little New England village stands a dark, weather-beaten, many-gabled house. This brooding mansion is haunted by a centuries-old curse that casts the shadow of ancestral sin upon the last four members of the distinctive Pyncheon family. Mysterious deaths threaten the living. Musty documents nestle behind hidden panels carrying the secret of the family's salvation-or its downfall. Hawthorne called The House of the Seven Gables "a Romance," and freely bestowed upon it many fascinating gothic touches. A brilliant intertwining of the popular, the symbolic, and the historical, the...

The principal setting is a communal farm called Blithedale (i.e., "Happy Valley"), a would-be modern Arcadia along the lines of the anti-capitalist ideals of Charles Fourier, yet is nonetheless destroyed by the self-interested behavior of some of its members. Among those members are: Hollingsworth, a monomaniacal philanthropist and confirmed misogynist who intends to turn Blithedale into a colony for the reformation of criminals; Zenobia, a passionate feminist of exotic origin who ironically finds Hollingsworth's misogyny irresistible; Priscilla, a young and impecunious seamstress from the...