The Scarlet Letter is an 1850 romantic work of fiction in a historical setting, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and is considered to be his magnum opus. Set in 17th-century Puritan Boston, Massachusetts, during the years 1642 to 1649, it tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter through an affair and struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. Throughout the book, Hawthorne explores themes of legalism, sin, and guilt. The experience of Hester and Dimmesdale recalls the story of Adam and Eve because, in both cases, sin results in expulsion and suffering. But it also results in knowledge – specifically, in knowledge of what it means to be immoral. For Hester, the Scarlet Letter is a physical manifestation of her sin and reminder of her painful solitude. She contemplates casting it off to obtain her freedom from an oppressive society and a checkered past as well as the absence of God. Because the society excludes her, she considers the possibility that many of the traditions held up by the Puritan culture are untrue and are not designed to bring her happiness.As for Dimmesdale, the "cheating minister", his sin gives him "sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind, so that his chest vibrate[s] in unison with theirs." His eloquent and powerful sermons derive from this sense of empathy. The narrative of the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale is quite in keeping with the oldest and most fully authorized principles in Christian thought. His "Fall" is a descent from apparent grace to his own damnation; he appears to begin in purity but he ends in corruption. The subtlety is that the minister's belief is his own cheating, convincing himself at every stage of his spiritual pilgrimage that he is saved. The rose bush's beauty forms a striking contrast to all that surrounds it – as later the beautifully embroidered scarlet "A" will be held out in part as an invitation to find "some sweet moral blossom" in the ensuing, tragic tale and in part as an image that "the deep heart of nature" (perhaps God) may look more kind on the errant Hester and her child than her Puritan neighbors do. Throughout the work, the nature images contrast with the stark darkness of the Puritans and their systems.Chillingworth's misshapen body reflects (or symbolizes) the anger in his soul, which builds as the novel progresses, similar to the way Dimmesdale's illness reveals his inner turmoil. The outward man reflects the condition of the heart; an observation thought to be inspired by the deterioration of Edgar Allan Poe, whom Hawthorne "much admired".

Virginia Woolf was an English writer, and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Orlando. Rachel Vinrace leaves on her father's ship for South America and her journey of self-discovery begins. The eclectic group of passengers provides Woolf with an opportunity to poke fun at Edwardian life. The novel is the first published by Woolf and introduces Clarissa Dalloway, the central character of Woolf's later novel, Mrs. Dalloway During the interwar period, Woolf was a signifi-cant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction". Other Books of V. Woolf: To the Lighthouse (1927)Mrs Dalloway (1925)A Haunted House (1921)Orlando (1928)Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street (1923)Between the Acts (1941)The Duchess and the Jeweller (1938)The New Dress (1927)The Mark on the Wall (1917)The Years (1937)

Seventeen: A Tale of Youth and Summer Time and the Baxter Family Especially William is a humorous novel by Booth Tarkington that gently satirizes first love, in the person of a callow 17-year-old, William Sylvanus Baxter. Seventeen takes place in a small city in the Midwestern United States shortly before World War I. It was published as sketches in the Metropolitan Magazine in 1914, and collected in a single volume in 1916, when it was the bestselling novel in the United States.

Penrod is a collection of comic sketches by Booth Tarkington that was first published in 1914. The book follows the misadventures of Penrod Schofield, an eleven-year-old boy growing up in the pre-World War I Midwestern United States, in a similar vein to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In Penrod, Tarkington established characters who appeared in two further books, Penrod and Sam (1916) and Penrod Jashber (1929). The three books were published together in one volume, Penrod: His Complete Story, in 1931.

Alexander's Bridge is the first novel by American author Willa Cather. First published in 1912, it was re-released with an author's preface in 1922. It also ran as a serial in McClure's, giving Cather some free time from her work for that magazine.

The story is told by Albert N. Wilmarth, an instructor of literature at Miskatonic University in Arkham. When local newspapers report strange things seen floating in rivers during a historic Vermont flood, Wilmarth becomes embroiled in a controversy about the reality and significance of the sightings, though he sides with the skeptics. Wilmarth uncovers old legends about monsters living in the uninhabited hills who abduct people who venture or settle too close to their territory.

"The Unnamable" is a horror short story by American author H. P. Lovecraft. It was written in September 1923, first published in the July 1925 issue of Weird Tales, and first collected in Beyond the Wall of Sleep. Carter, a weird fiction writer, who is likely the Randolph Carter who features in some of Lovecraft's other tales such as The Statement of Randolph Carter, meets with his close friend, Joel Manton, in a cemetery near an old, dilapidated house on Meadow Hill in the town of Arkham, Massachusetts. As the two sit upon a weathered tomb, Carter tells Manton the tale of an indescribable entity that allegedly haunts the house and surrounding area. He contends that because such an entity cannot be perceived by the five senses, it becomes impossible to quantify and accurately describe, thus earning itself the term unnamable.

The story is written in first person. It depicts the main character going outside Hampden and finding a special tree. The tree makes him day dream about a big temple in a land with three suns. The temple was half-violet, half-blue. Some shadows attracted him into the inside. He thought he saw three flaming eyes watching him and he shouted twice and the vision was gone.

Then I was a little girl, which is now a good many years ago, there came to spend some time with us a cousin who had been brought up in Germany. ??She was almost grown-up—to me, a child of six or seven, she seemed quite grown-up; in reality, she was, I suppose, about fifteen or sixteen. She was a bright, kind, good-natured girl, very anxious to please and amuse her little English cousins, especially me, as I was the only girl. ??But she had not had much to do with small children; above all, delicate children, and she was so strong and hearty herself that she did not understand anything about nervous fears and fancies.

"The Strange High House in the Mist" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft. Written on November 9, 1926, it was first published in the October 1931 issue of Weird Tales. It concerns a character traveling to the titular house which is perched on the top of cliff which seems inaccessible both by land and sea, yet is apparently inhabited. Thomas Olney, a "philosopher" visiting the town of Kingsport, Massachusetts with his family, is intrigued by a strange house on a cliff overlooking the ocean. It is unaccountably high and old and the locals have a generations-long dread of the place which no one is known to have visited.

"The Statement of Randolph Carter" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft. Written December 1919, it was first published in The Vagrant, May 1920. It tells of a traumatic event in the life of Randolph Carter, a student of the occult loosely representing Lovecraft himself. It is the first story in which Carter appears and is part of Lovecraft's Dream Cycle.

Many ages ago in North America there was no spring or summer or autumn, but only winter all the time; there were no forests or fields or flowers, but only ice and snow, which stretched from the Arctic Ocean to Maryland. Sometimes the climate would grow a little warmer, and then the great glaciers would shrink toward the north, and then again it would grow cold, while the ice crept southward; but finally it became warmer and warmer until all the southern part of the country was quite free from the ice and snow, which could then only be seen, as it is now, in the Polar regions.??Ages and ages after this, grass and trees began to ap-pear, and at last great forests covered the land, and over the fields and through the woods gigantic animals roved—strange and terrible-looking beasts, larger than any animal now living, and very fierce and strong. Among these were the mammoth and mastodon, which were so strong and ferocious that it would take hundreds of men to hunt and kill them. These great animals would go trampling through the forests, breaking down the trees and crushing the grass and flowers under their feet, or rush over the fields in pursuit of their prey, making such dreadful, threatening noises that all the other animals would flee before them, just as now the more timid animals flee from the lion or rhinoceros. ??Sometimes they would rush or be driven by men into swamps and marshes, where their great weight would sink them down so deep into the mud that they could not lift themselves out again, and then, they would die of starvation or be killed by the arrows of the men who were hunting them.??Besides these mammoths and mastodons there were other animals living in North America at that time, very different from those that are found here now. ?

"The Shunned House" is a horror fiction novelette by American author H. P. Lovecraft, written on October 16–19, 1924. It was first published in the October 1937 issue of Weird Tales. The Shunned House of the title is based on an actual house in Providence, Rhode Island, built around 1763 and still standing at 135 Benefit Street. Lovecraft was familiar with the house because his aunt Lillian Clark lived there in 1919-20 as a companion to Mrs. H. C. Babbit. However, it was another house in Elizabeth, New Jersey that actually compelled Lovecraft to write the story.

So long a time had passed that Dorothy C. had grown to be what father John called "a baker's dozen of years old"; and upon another spring morning, as fair as that when she first came to them, the girl was out upon the marble steps, scrubbing away most vigorously. The task was known locally as "doing her front," and if one wishes to be considerable respectable, in Baltimore, one's "front" must be done every day. On Saturdays the entire marble facing of the basement must also be polished; but "pernickity" Mrs. Chester was known to her neighbors as such a forehanded housekeeper that she had her Saturday's work done on Friday, if this were possible.??Now this was Friday and chanced to be a school holiday; so Dorothy had been set to the week-end task, which she hated; and therefore she put all the more energy into it, the sooner to have done with it, meanwhile singing at the top of her voice. Then, when the postman came round the corner of the block, she paused in her singing to stare at him for one brief instant. The next she had pitched her voice a few notes higher still, and it was her song that greeted her father's ears and set him smiling in his old familiar fashion. ??Unfortunately, he had not been smiling when she first perceived him and there had been a little catch in her tones as she resumed her song. Each was trying to deceive the other and each pretending that nothing of the sort was happening.??"Heigho, my child! At it again, giving the steps a more tombstone effect? Well, since it's the fashion—go ahead!"??"I wish the man, or men, who first thought of putting scrubby-steps before people's houses had them all to clean himself! Hateful old thing!"

A lone traveler seeks shelter from an approaching storm in an apparently abandoned house, only to find that it is occupied by a "loathsome old, white-bearded, and ragged man."

Poetry and the Gods is a short story by horror writer and poet H.P. Lovecraft in collaboration with writer Anna Helen Crofts. The story is very different from the vast majority of Lovecraft's other work and collaborations. It does, however, bear similar themes regarding dreams as a doorway to magic realms, and slumbering gods. The narrative follows the dream-voyage of Marcia, a young woman filled with weariness of the mundane world and all its woes. She resolves to ease her troubled soul by reading a magazine of poetry. As she does, a dream-state unfolds in which the Greek god Hermes appears and bears Marcia to the court of Zeus and the Olympians.

—Estas??—Si, corriendo.? Y corriendo, corriendo, azotando las puertas con sus vuelos de seda, desde el tocador al gabinete y desde el armario al espejo, siempre en el retoque de ultima hora; buscando el alfiler o el abanico que perdian su cabecilla de loca, volviendose desde la calle para cenir a su garganta el collar, haciendome entrar todavia por el panolito de encaje olvidado sobre la silla, saliamos al fin todas las noches con hora y media de retraso, aunque con luz del sol empezara ella la archidificil obra de poner a nivel de la belleza de su cara la delicadeza de su adorno.?Gracias habia que dar si cuando al primer farol, ella, parandose, me preguntaba: "Que tal voy?", no le contestaba yo: "Bien, muy guapa", con absoluto convencimiento; porque capaz era la nina de volverse en ultima instancia al tribunal supremo del espejo, y entonces, ?adios, teatro!..., llegabamos a la salida. Como ocurria muchas veces.? Ella muy de prisa, yo a su lado, un poco detras, no muy cerca, con mezcla del respeto galante del caballero a la dama y del respeto grave del groom a la duquesita. Cuando en la vuelta de una esquina rozaban mi brazo sus cintas, yo le pedia perdon. Mirabala sin querer a la luz de los escaparates, y cuando alguna mujer del pueblo quedabase parada floreandola, yo la decia: "Mira, oyes?", y sonreia ella triunfante como una reina... ? ?AUTOR: Felipe Trigo Sanchez (1864 – 1916) fue medico rural y militar, y posteriormente escritor espanol. Nacido en Villanueva de la Serena, en el seno de una familia de clase media con dificultades economicas por la temprana muerte del padre, Felipe Trigo curso el bachillerato en Badajoz y la carrera de medicina en el Hospital de San Carlos de Madrid. Su experiencia como estudiante forastero en la capital la plasmaria en la novela En la carrera. Tras licenciarse, casado ya con su companera de facultad, Consuelo Seco de Herrera, ejercio como medico titular en los pueblos pacenses de Trujillanos y Valverde de Merida, circunstancia biografica que tambien novelizaria en El medico rural. Hastiado de la vida rural, entro por oposicion en el Cuerpo de Sanidad Militar. Su primer destino fue Sevilla, donde comenzo su actividad periodistica que ya habia intentado en Madrid. De Sevilla paso a Trubia, como medico de la fabrica de armas. Anos despues marcho voluntario a unas Filipinas en plena rebelion. Destinado como medico en Fuerte Victoria, en realidad un destacamento de prisioneros tagalos, estuvo a punto de perder la vida durante una escaramuza. Los sublevados le asestaron no menos de siete machetazos, dejandolo por muerto. Trigo, sin embargo, consiguio huir a campo traves, en espantosas condiciones. Con una mano inutilizada, fue repatriado como mutilado de guerra, con el grado de teniente coronel. La prensa le recibio como ?el heroe de Fuerte Victoria? y llego a ser propuesto para la Cruz Laureada de San Fernando. Rechazando la posibilidad de capitalizar politicamente su celebridad, en 1900 se retiro del Ejercito y fijo su residencia en Merida para dedicarse en exclusiva a la literatura...

"The Moon-Bog" is a short story by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, written in or before March 1921. The story was first published in the June 1926 issue of the pulp magazine Weird Tales. In the story, the unnamed narrator describes the final fate of his good friend, Denys Barry, an Irish-American who reclaims an ancestral estate in Kilderry, a fictional village in Ireland. Barry ignores pleas from the superstitious local peasantry not to drain the nearby bog, with unfortunate supernatural consequences.

Al sentir un roce en el cuello, Fernando de Ojeda soltó la pluma y levantó la cabeza. Una palmera enana movía detrás de él con balanceo repentino sus anchas manos de múltiples y puntiagudos dedos. Para evitarse este contacto avanzó el sillón de junco, pero no pudo seguir escribiendo. Algo nuevo había ocurrido en torno de él mientras con el pecho en el filo de la mesa y los ojos sobre los papeles huía lejos, muy lejos, acompa?ado en esta fuga ideal por el leve crujido de la pluma. Vio con el mismo aspecto exterior cosas y personas al salir de su abstracción; pero una vida interna, ruidosa y móvil parecía haber nacido en las cosas hasta entonces inanimadas, mientras la vida ordinaria callaba y se encogía en las personas, como poseída de súbita timidez.??Sus ojos, fatigados por la escritura, huían de las ampollas eléctri-cas del techo, inflamadas en plena tarde, para reposarse en los rectángulos de las ventanas que encuadraban el azul grisáceo de un día de invierno. La blancura de la madera laqueada temblaba con cierto reflejo húmedo que parecía venir del exterior. Dos salones agrandados por la escasez de su altura eran el campo visual de Ojeda. En el primero, donde estaba él, mezclábase a la blancura uniforme de la decoración el verde charolado de las palmeras de inver-náculo, el verde pictórico de los enrejados de madera tendidos de pilastra a pilastra y el verde amarillento y velludo de unas parras artificiales, cuyas hojas parecían retazos de terciopelo. Sillones de floreada cretona en torno de las mesas de bambú formaban islas, a las que se acogían grupos de personas para embadurnar con manteca y mermeladas el pan tostado, husmear el perfume del té o seguir el burbujeo de las aguas minerales te?idas de jarabes y licores. ? AUTOR: Vicente Blasco Ibanez nacio el 29 de enero de 1867 en Valencia (Espana). Era hijo de Ramona Ibanez y del comerciante Gaspar Blanco. Estudio Derecho en la Universidad de Valencia. Participo en la politica uniendose al Partido Republicano". En 1894 fundo el periodico El pueblo. En el ano 1896, fue detenido y condenado a varios meses de prision. En 1889 contrajo matrimonio con Maria Blasco del Cacho, hija del magistrado Rafael Blasco y Moreno. Cuando subio al poder Canovas del Castillo, el escritor se exilio brevemente en la ciudad de Paris. Fue un autor vinculado en muchos aspectos al naturalismo frances. Por otra parte, la explicita intencion politicosocial de algunas de las novelas de Blasco Ibanez, aunada al escaso bagaje intelectual del autor, lo mantuvo alejado de los representantes de la Generacion del 98. Murio el 28 de enero de 1928 en Menton (Francia)a los 60 anos. Entre sus titulos destacan: "Arroz y Tartana" (1894), "La Barraca" (1898), "Entre Naranjos (1900), "Canas y Barro" (1902), "La Horda" (1905), "Sangre y Arena" (1908) o "Los Cuatro Jinetes Del Apocalipsis" (1916).

An undertaker finds himself trapped in the vault where coffins are stored during winter for burial in the spring, and is mysteriously injured when he escapes.

"Hypnos" is a short story by H.P. Lovecraft, penned in March 1922 and first published in the May 1923 issue of National Amateur. The narrator, a sculptor, recounts meeting a mysterious man in a railway station. The moment the man opened his "immense, sunken and widely luminous eyes", the narrator knew that the stranger would become his friend-–"the only friend of one who had never possessed a friend before". In the eyes of the stranger he saw the knowledge of the mysteries he always sought to learn