![]() Herman Melville (the brains behind Moby-Dick) reacted to "Young Goodman Brown" the exact same way. Why? Did he underestimate what he'd written? But for some reason, Hawthorne repeatedly decided not to include "Young Goodman Brown" in his early collections of stories. "Young Goodman Brown" deals with some heavy stuff: the grip of the past, the power of social expectations, and the transformation of a single person's entire way of living. (That would be The Scarlet Letter.) So you can think of "Young Goodman Brown" (published in 1835) as a kind of preview of The Scarlet Letter (1850): all the same themes, many fewer pages. "Young Goodman Brown" is one of Hawthorne's signature stories-even if it didn't exactly make Nathaniel Hawthorne famous. ![]() More like evil, witchcraft, and the sudden loss of innocence. With a title like "Young Goodman Brown," you're probably expecting a fun romp about a bright-eyed lad strolling merrily through the forest, pretty much like a 19th-century Disney cartoon. ![]()
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