In one of his public disavowals of autobiography, Nathaniel Hawthorne informed his readers that external traits "hide the man, instead of displaying him," directing them instead to "look through the whole range of his fictitious characters, good and evil, in order to detect any of his essential traits." In this multidimensional biography of America's first great storyteller, Edwin Haviland Miller answers Hawthorne's challenge and reveals the inner landscapes of this modest, magnetic man who hid himself in his fiction. Thomas Woodson hails Miller's account as "the best biography of this most elusive of American authors."

 Edwin Haviland Miller is professor of English emeritus at New York University and editor of the six-volume Correspondence of Walt Whitman. Author of Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Iowa), he has also written a biography of Herman Melville and books and articles about other nineteenth-century American authors.