As I have tried to suggest more than once, the 1835 break-up of the third of Hawthorne's early collections— “The Story Teller”— is a sadly significant event in the literary history of America in the nineteenth century. And beyond. In the historic moment, it almost certainly contributed to the author's growing discouragement about the viability of a literary career: how long could one go on writing anonymously (or pseudonymously) for magazines and yearbooks? Surely we are not to understand the year (1836) spent editing The American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge as anything but a last resort. To be sure, the quality of the editing, and of Hawthorne's own contributions, is fairly high. Then too, the literary enterprise appeared to be rescued when a former classmate subvented the publication of the Twice-Told Tales. Yet the rescue was hardly complete. That collection may have opened an “intercourse with the world” for this “obscurest man of letters in America,” but it was far from the kind of thing the author originally had in mind.

Essentially a miscellany— pairing “Wakefield” with “A Rill from the Town Pump,” “Endicott and the Red Cross” with “The Lily's Quest”— it altogether lacks the kind of formal and thematic unity Hawthorne had clearly aimed at in his out-setting “Seven Tales of My Native Land,” which seemed to be experimenting with the enforced combination of gothic and domestic sentiment, and the astonishingly sophisticated “Provincial Tales,” in which Hawthorne's ironic patriotism might frighten Oliver Stone. And it published most of the tales intended for “The Story-Teller” quite apart from the scenes of their local performance, whose “frames” their narrator had modestly suggested might be “more valuable than the pictures themselves”; and, significantly for this study, without benefit of their fully characterized Narrator— an orphan in the care of a puritanic minister, then a run-away, committed to story-telling against all New England odds, the traveling companion of one Eliakim Abbott, who looks to the Story-Teller somewhat like an “unfledged divine from Andover” (180), and whose memory Hawthorne called to mind when he first came to understand Jones Very. Nothing else remotely like this in the early years of a tenuously emergent American belles lettres. An experiment complex enough to warrant its own chapter in Anybody's History of Narratology