Twice Told Tales Author:Nathaniel Hawthorne Twice-Told Tales is one of the few books in American literature which caused a book review of it to become more famous than the initial work itself. This collection of short stories was first published in 1837, and expanded for a second edition in 1842. That same year, Edgar Allan Poe reviewed it for Graham's Magazine. Poe's review has become... more » famous because it was the first American attempt to define the genre of the short storie, short pieces of prose fiction, more commonly called "tales" in the Nineteenth Century. Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) and Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (1842) marked the first significant collections of short stories in American literature.
To Nathaniel Hawthorne, this collection of tales was more than an effort to provide a critical base for the short story. It was the occasion of his first successful book and it marked the result of twelve years of work and loneliness and frustration in the literary craft.