Nathaniel Hawthorne: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn
1804 to 1864
Quick answer: Nathaniel Hawthorne craft file: the symbol nobody explains, the multiple-choice ending, "Young Goodman Brown" and "The Minister's Black Veil", and what to steal.
Quick facts
- Born: 1804, Salem, Massachusetts
- Died: 1864, Plymouth, New Hampshire, aged 59
- Wrote in: English
- Known for: "Young Goodman Brown", "The Minister's Black Veil", "Rappaccini's Daughter"
- Signature move: A symbol the narrator refuses to interpret
- Start with: "The Minister's Black Veil" (1836)
Hawthorne wrote his tales anonymously in Salem through his twenties and thirties, and by Twice-Told Tales (1837) he had the method that runs through everything he wrote: put a strange object in the middle of an ordinary Puritan town and decline to say what it means. The veil, the pink ribbons, the birthmark shaped like a hand are still argued over in classrooms because he built them to be.
What he actually does on the page
He plants an object and lets the town interpret it while he stays silent. In "The Minister's Black Veil" (1836) the Reverend Hooper appears one Sunday with a piece of black crape over his face and never removes it, not for his fiancee, not on his deathbed. The parishioners supply theories; the story supplies none. The subtitle, "A Parable", is a dare: a parable with no stated moral.
He offers the reader a choice and makes both options cost something. "Young Goodman Brown" (1835) sends its hero into the forest to a witch meeting where he sees his wife Faith, and then asks: "Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?" The narrator answers that it does not matter, because Brown lives the rest of his life as a gloomy, distrustful man either way. The ambiguity is the plot's engine, not an evasion of it.
He writes scientists as sinners of a specific kind. Aylmer in "The Birth-Mark" (1843) removes the hand-shaped mark from his wife's cheek and kills her with the cure; Rappaccini in "Rappaccini's Daughter" (1844) raises a daughter on poison so nothing can harm her, and so nothing can touch her. The crime in each is the same: the refusal to accept an imperfect living thing.
The signature move
The uninterpreted symbol is best studied in the veil. Hawthorne gives Hooper only one direct statement about it, to his fiancee Elizabeth, that it is a sign and a mortal must wear it, and then lets thirty years pass. What makes the device work is everything around it: the veil's physical effect on the congregation, the way children flee, the way the dying feel he understands them, the way it makes Hooper a better preacher and a lonelier man. He records consequences in detail and withholds cause entirely. The final paragraph, with the veil rotting on the corpse's face, refuses one last time. A writer can learn from this that mystery is sustained by precision everywhere else.
Stories to read first
Seven tales, mostly from the 1830s and 1840s.
What to steal for your own stories
Exercises drawn from the tales.
What not to copy
The prose is slow by any standard but its own century's, and the allegorical habit can tip into lecture: several tales end by telling you what the emblem stood for, which undoes the good work of withholding. His women are victims or poisons, and his Puritan past is partly costume. Take the withheld cause; leave the moral-in-the-last-paragraph.
Life at a glance
- 1804: Born in Salem, descended from a judge at the 1692 witch trials
- 1832: "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" and "Roger Malvin's Burial" appear anonymously
- 1835: "Young Goodman Brown" and "Wakefield"
- 1837: Twice-Told Tales, his first collection under his own name
- 1846: Mosses from an Old Manse, including "The Birth-Mark" and "Rappaccini's Daughter"
- 1850: The Scarlet Letter; meets Melville in the Berkshires
- 1853: Appointed American consul at Liverpool
- 1864: Dies in his sleep on a trip through New Hampshire
What writers can take from this
- Describe every effect of your mystery and none of its cause.
- Offer the reader two explanations and make the outcome the same under both.
- Let the community's gossip do your exposition.
- Write the flaw a character cannot tolerate before you write the character.
- Keep the emblem physical: crape, a ribbon, a mark on skin.
Try it yourself
Someone in a small workplace arrives one Monday wearing or carrying something they will not explain and will not remove. Write six weeks in under 1,000 words, entirely through what colleagues say and do. The object must change the person's standing in the office. The story never gives the reason.
Questions
What is Nathaniel Hawthorne's best short story?
"Young Goodman Brown" (1835) is the most taught and most argued over. "The Minister's Black Veil" (1836) and "Rappaccini's Daughter" (1844) are the other two most often ranked at the top.
How did Hawthorne influence the short story?
He gave American fiction the moral allegory with an unresolved centre, and Poe's 1842 review of Twice-Told Tales produced the first theory of the short story. Melville, Henry James and Flannery O'Connor all worked from him.
Is Hawthorne hard to read?
The sentences are long and formal and the pace is stately, so he needs more patience than Poe. The tales themselves are short and the plots are clear once the voice settles.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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