Abstract
The French and Italian Notebooks of Nathaniel Hawthorne are an exception to his other works, in that they reveal not only his peculiar idiosyncrasies, but also characteristics which tend to humanize the man. For over one hundred years Hawthorne has seemed more or less to the vast majority of his readers to bear a resemblance to his ghostly characters, or, to use the words of his friend, James T. Fields, "to rest in the twilight of impersonality", rather than to possess the flesh and blood which made up the man whom many critics now name America's greatest writer.