Date of Graduation

1984

Document Type

Thesis

Abstract

Julian Hawthorne, the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne, was once a popular writer whose fictional works include twenty-four novels and over eighty short stories. Though he was highly regarded by many critics in his time, he is little known today, even among scholars specializing in American literature. The few studies of Hawthorne written in this century generally concur with an opinion commonly expressed by Hawthorne's contemporaries: that he wrote too rapidly to produce carefully crafted novels though he was more successful with his short stories and novellas. Most of his stories have never been collected or anthologized, however, so there has never been a detailed study of Hawthorne's short fiction. This study is an attempt to assess Hawthorne's craft as a short story writer and to determine his significance in American letters, through examination of his short fiction. Considering the stories in roughly chronological order, one sees that, whereas many of his early stories are imitations of his father's work and are often overplotted, he came to develop his own voice as a writer and found the proper scope of the short story. Hawthorne's talent is especially revealed in his stories exploring man-woman relationships. In these, Hawthorne demonstrates genuine insight and presents well-drawn characters. Hawthorne's truly memorable stories are few, however, as he was a very inconsistent writer throughout his career. Through examining Hawthorne's stories in the context of the magazines for which he wrote, one can see that his talent was inhibited by the tastes of the magazines as well as by the economic necessity of turning out stories rapidly. Nonetheless, the overall quality of Hawthorne's work is sufficient to place him alongside such other short story writers of his time as Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Ambrose Bierce, and O. Henry as a significant minor figure in the history of the American short story.

Download

Share

COinS