For the next 12 years, Hawthorne lived in comparative isolation in an upstairs chamber at his mother’s house, where he worked at perfecting his writing craft. He also began keeping notebooks or journals, a habit he continued throughout his life. He often jotted down ideas and descriptions, and his words are now a rich source of information about his themes, ideas, style experiments, and subjects.
In 1828, he published his first novel, Fanshaw: A Tale, at his own expense. Fanshaw was a short, imitation Gothic novel and poorly written. Dissatisfied with this novel, Hawthorne attempted to buy up all the copies so that no one could read it. He did not publish another novel for almost 25 years. By 1838, he had written two-thirds of the short stories he was to write in his lifetime. None of these stories gained him much attention, and he could not interest a publisher in printing a collection of his tales until 1837, when his college friend Horatio Bridge backed the publishing of Twice-Told Tales, a collection of Hawthorne’s stories that had been published separately in magazines. His schoolmate and friend, Longfellow, reviewed the book with glowing terms. Edgar Allan Poe, known for his excoriating reviews of writers, not only wrote warmly of Hawthorne’s book but also took the opportunity to define the short story in his now famous review. Twice-Told Tales is considered a masterpiece of literature, and it contains unmistakably American stories.
