Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) is perhaps best known for his novels of the 1850s, The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), and The Blithedale Romance (1852). Yet in the two decades before this creative outpouring, Hawthorne was busy composing some of the most famous short stories written by an American author. Titles such as "The Minister's Black Veil" and "The Shaker Bridal," both of which were originally published in The Token, found their way into Twice-Told Tales (1837, 1842), Hawthorne's first collection of short stories. Years later he took several stories that had previously appeared in literary journals such as the New-England Magazine and compiled them into Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), a volume that many readers, antebellum as well as contemporary, believe includes some of his greatest short works, for example, "Rappaccini's Daughter," "Young Goodman...