Hawthorne, Nathaniel

New York. 1961. December 1961. Signet/New American Library. 1st Signet Classic Paperback Edition. Very Good in Wrappers. 0451501128. Afterword By Murray Kreiger. 346 pages. paperback. CD112. Cover: Lambert. keywords: Signet Classic Literature America 19th Century Paperback. FROM THE PUBLISHER - Henry James wrote of The Marble Faun: 'Hawthorne has done few things more beautiful than the picture of the unequal complicity of guilt between his immature and dimly - puzzled hero, with his clinging, unquestioning, unexacting devotion, and the dark, powerful, more widely - seeing feminine nature of Miriam. . If the book contained nothing else noteworthy but. . the murder committed by Donatello under Miriam's eyes and the ecstatic wandering, afterward, of the guilty couple through the 'bloodstained streets of Rome,' it would still deserve to rank high among the imaginative productions of our day.' The cosmopolitanism of this novel foreshadows one of the most important themes in our literature - the 'international theme' which was 40 later dominate the work of Henry James. Of all Hawthorne's fiction, The Marble Faun clearly dispels the myth of Hawthorne's unwavering Puritan morality. It projects the author's fascination with the eternal struggle between, in Murray Krieger's words, 'the unfeeling virtue of moral severity and the yielding grace of faulty humanity . . the profound conflict between the limited claims of American moralism and of European aestheticism.' inventory #31065 ISBN: 0451501128.