Hawthorne is well and alive, as witnessed by various conference presentations. Among these are:
Hawthorne opens The Marble Faun (1860) with “a familiar kind of Preface.” His preface is familiar for two reasons: first, the practice was by then conventional, and second, it is addressed to “that friend of friends, that unseen brother of the soul, whose apprehensive sympathy has so often encouraged me to be egotistical in my Prefaces.” His only concern is that in the interval since his last publication, “that all-sympathizing critic” might have died or lost interest. My paper will chart Hawthorne’s transition from the obscurest man to a living lion of American letters. By the end of his career, as Richard Brodhead has demonstrated, Hawthorne had become one of his very own literary inheritors. But there is a great deal of continuity between the anonymous teller of stories and the acclaimed historical romancer. “The Battle-Omen,”...
