Product Description

On July 28, 1851, Nathaniel Hawthorne's wife Sophia and daughters Una and Rose left their house in Western Massachusetts to visit relatives near Boston. Hawthorne and his five-year-old son Julian stayed behind. How father and son got along over the next three weeks is the subject of this tender and funny extract from Hawthorne's notebooks.

"At about six o'clock I looked over the edge of my bed and saw that Julian was awake, peeping sideways at me." Each day starts early and is mostly given over to swimming and skipping stones, berry-picking and subduing armies of thistles. There are lots of questions ("It really does seem as if he has baited me with more questions, references, and observations, than mortal father ought to be expected to endure"), a visit to a Shaker community, domestic crises concerning a pet rabbit, and some poignant moments of loneliness ("I went to bed at about nine and longed for Phoebe"). And one evening Mr. Herman Melville comes by to enjoy a late-night discussion of eternity over cigars.

With an introduction by Paul Auster that paints a beautifully observed, intimate picture of the Hawthornes at home, this little-known, true-life story by a great American writer emerges from obscurity to shine a delightful light upon family life—then and now.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #264632 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-31
• Released on: 2003-05-31
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 7.30" h x .56" w x 5.24" l, .50 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 128 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This charming extract from Nathaniel Hawthorne's American Notebooks is, as described by Paul Auster in his introduction, "something that no writer had ever attempted before Hawthorne: a meticulous, blow-by-blow account of a man taking care of a young child by himself." When his wife and daughters went away on a three-week visit, Hawthorne stayed home with five-year-old Julian. The writer's musings on this adventure are, in Auster's words, "at once comic, self-deprecatory, and vaguely befuddled," as he discovers how insistent a child's needs are, and how boundless his energy. They take walks to the lake and play with their pet rabbit; Hawthorne tends to a wasp sting, tries to tame unruly hair and discovers the pleasure of finally putting the "old gentleman" to bed after a long day during which it was "impossible to write, read, think, or even to sleep...so constant are his appeals to me." Unusual evidence, if any were needed, that a writer does indeed need a room of his (or her) own. B&w illus.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
In late July 1851, Sophia Hawthorne and her daughters, seven-year-old Una and two-month-old Rose, went to visit her parents near Boston, leaving her son Julian with his father at home in a small Berkshire hills farmhouse. The novelist kept a journal of the 20 days that he and his five-year-old scion bached it (a housekeeper cooked and cleaned for them, however), which lay buried within the 800-page American Notebooks (1932) until now. As Paul Auster says in a superb introduction more than half as long as the journal, it shows us a different side of Hawthorne. Gone is the density and brooding of his fictional prose, replaced by straightforward recording and clearly registered observation expressed in everyday vocabulary. An undemanding parent, he quite adores his son, though Julian's volubility astounds and occasionally wearies him. He likes to call the little boy "the old gentleman," but otherwise there is nothing precious or sentimental in his writing about him. The journal is a tiny classic of parental writing about children. Ray Olson
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