Massachusetts author Nathaniel Hawthorne never gave a public reading in his lifetime. On the afternoon of November 7, however, the reclusive author returned to Boston to share his literary prowess with an audience at the Meeting House! Best known for novels including The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables, both of which were published in Boston, Hawthorne reads from some of his short works exploring the dark side of human nature.

Rob Velella is an independent literary historian and playwright specializing in American literature of the nineteenth century. As a scholar, Velella has published articles and presented academic papers on figures as varied as Rufus Griswold, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Walt Whitman. He served as guest curator for "Margaret Fuller: Woman of the Nineteenth Century" at Harvard's Houghton Library and as research associate for "The Raven in the Frog Pond: Edgar Allan Poe and Boston" for the Boston Public Library. In addition to his dramatic presentations, he maintains the American Literary Blog, an "almost-daily celebration of important (and not-so-important) dates in 19th-century American literary history."

This program is the second in a Special Middays at the Meeting House Series – “Conversations with Hawthorne and Thoreau”: Fridays, October 24 and November 7.

This talk was filmed on November 7, 2014, at the Old South Meeting House.

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