Book Description

"Well-written, scrupulously researched, and simultaneously sympathetic and critical toward its subject, Reynolds's book is important not only for its historically responsive account of Hawthorne's widely misunderstood politics but also its invigorating portrait of a perceptive author who struggled to resist the political extremism that swept the Northern states before and after the bombardment of Fort Sumter." ---New England Quarterly "This beautifully written, thoroughly researched study faces criticism of Hawthorne, both in his day and the present, for his stance on slavery and the Civil War. . . . Reynolds shows Hawthorne to have rejected the extremism of the abolitionists, been a pacifist who hoped war could be avoided . . . and hated slavery even more than war---but at the same to have been deeply prejudiced, to have feared amalgamation (or miscegenation), and never to have acknowledged the real horrors of slavery." ---Choice Widely condemned even in his own time, Nathaniel Hawthorne's views on abolitionism and slavery are today frequently characterized by scholars as morally reprehensible. Devils and Rebels explores the historical and biographical record to reveal striking evidence of the author's true political values---values grounded in pacifism and resistant to the kind of binary thinking that could lead to violence and war. With fresh readings of Hawthorne's four major romances and his less familiar works, Devils and Rebels illuminates the difficulties faced by public intellectuals during times of political strife---an issue as relevant today as it was some 150 years ago. Larry J. Reynolds is Thomas Franklin Mayo Professor of Liberal Arts and Professor of English at Texas A&M University.