Miscellaneous Prose and Verse

Early in the planning of this Centenary Edition, the editors decided to set aside a final volume for those works of Hawthorne that did not find a place in the previous volumes. Many of these works were written early in Hawthorne's career, going back as far as his precollege years, and from the still hazily understood time of his earliest periodical publications - sometimes pseudonymous, more often anonymous. The Life of Franklin Pierce - which did not belong with the romances, however loud the satirical charges of political opponents that it did - finds its place in this volume, along with the first complete publication of Pierce's Mexican diary, which Hawthorne used in composing his Life.