‘‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux’’ was first published in the 1832 edition of The Token, an annual book of essays, poetry, and short fiction to which Hawthorne contributed several pieces over the years. The story was published anonymously, and it was not until 1836, when journalist Park Benjamin wrote a review of that year’s Token, that the reading public came to know Hawthorne’s name. Having read ‘‘a sufficient number of his pieces to make the reputation of a dozen of our Yankee scribblers,’’ he praises Hawthorne’s style, and his modesty in remaining anonymous. ‘‘If Mr. Hawthorne would but collect his various tales and essays into one volume,’’ Benjamin notes, ‘‘we can assure him that their success would be brilliant—certainly in England, perhaps in this country.’’ Hawthorne did issue a collection the next year, and it did sell well, but it did not include ‘‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux.’’ The story did not appear again until 1851, in the collection Snow-Image.

When Snow-Image appeared in 1851, it was quickly overshadowed by Hawthorne’s great novel, The Scarlet Letter, published in the same year. By this time, Hawthorne was widely recognized as an important writer, both in the United States and in England, as Benjamin had predicted. Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville had reviewed his stories with approval. In what may be the first published overview of Hawthorne’s work, Henry T. Tuckerman describes the stories in terms that seem especially appropriate for ‘‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux’’: ‘‘He always takes us below the surface and beyond the material; his most inartificial stories are eminently suggestive; he makes us breathe the air of contemplation, and turns our eyes inward. It is as if we went forth, in a dream.’’ Tuckerman did not mention ‘‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux’’ specifically in his article, nor did Henry James in his 1879 book-length study of Hawthorne.

In an article published in 1957 in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Seymour Gross observes, ‘‘It is one of the peculiarities of the study of American literature that, despite the abundance of critical effort expended on Hawthorne’s fiction, what is perhaps his most powerful story, ‘‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux,’’ has been until only recently all but completely ignored.’’ At the time, Gross was unable to identify a single anthology of American literature or of short stories that included ‘‘My Kinsman.’’ But the 1950s saw the publication of several critical articles on the story, and although the number of publications has tapered off in the intervening decades, the story continues to be popular.

Most twentieth-century critics have read the story as a psychological examination of Robin, with the historical setting as mere background. Several have used Freudian psychology to examine Robin’s search for a father figure, or for independence. In a 1959 article in Criticism tellingly titled ‘‘Robin Molineux on the Analyst’s Couch,’’ Roy Harvey Pearce explains that Robin gains freedom only by participating in the guilty act of mocking his father figure. Roy R. Male, in Hawthorne’s Tragic Vision (1957), demonstrates that each man Robin meets in town is a distorted father-figure. He draws on ‘‘the Freudian theory of dream interpretation, which asserts that visions of the father figure may commonly be split into two or more images.’’

Other critics have read the story as primarily concerning history. For some, it is a historical allegory. Q. D. Leavis, in a 1951 article for Sewanee Review, proposes ‘‘America Comes of Age’’ as a suitable subtitle for the story, and suggests that the story is easiest to understand as a ‘‘poetic parable in dramatic form.’’ In her reading, Robin represents young America, coming to adulthood by casting off dependence on the authority figure Molineux/England. John P. McWilliams, Jr., agrees that history is at the center of the story, but disagrees with Leavis about the theme. He argues in a 1976 article in Studies in Romanticism that Robin does not in fact ‘‘come of age,’’ nor show any signs of learning. McWilliams suggests that Hawthorne appreciated Independence but did not fully approve of all the means used to achieve it. Robin might stand for ‘‘those readers who, even when confronted with the violence and demagoguery of the Revolution, prove unwilling or unable to recognize them.’’