What Do I Read Next?
- Published in 1851, The House of the Seven Gables is Hawthorne's third novel, which he considered superior to The Scarlet Letter. It narrates the story of the Pyncheon family's cursed house, where the sins of ancestors haunt their descendants.
- Howard Norman's 1994 novel, The Bird Artist, centers on an artist in a small coastal village in Newfoundland. The plot delves into themes of crime and adultery, set in a place devoid of the religious strictness found in Hawthorne's Boston.
- Carol F. Karlsen's 1987 work, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England, reveals that the brutal Salem witch trials primarily targeted women, especially those poised to inherit property and gain power.
- William Cronon's Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983) is a groundbreaking environmental history book that examines the effects early settlers had on New England's native peoples and their environment.
- Rebecca Harding Davis's 1861 novel, Life in the Iron Mills, powerfully depicts the physical and emotional hardships faced by a mid-nineteenth-century mill worker. Published about a decade after Hawthorne's novel, it stands out even more starkly against the backdrop of literary transcendentalism.
- Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" (1849), originally titled "Resistance to Civil Government," argues for an individual's right to refuse to support civil authority when it conflicts with their conscience. Thoreau himself spent time in jail in 1843 for not paying taxes as a protest against the Mexican War.
- Harriet A. Jacobs's 1861 narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, is a unique "romance" slave narrative that intertwines themes of sexuality and race in pre-Civil War America.
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