Nathaniel Hawthorne 
A Wonder Book for Girls & Boys 

‘A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys’ is a children’s book by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne in which he retells several Greek myths. The stories are all stories within a story. The frame story is that Eunice Bright, a Williams College student, is telling these tales to a group of children at Tanglewood, an area in Lenox, Massachusetts, where Hawthorne lived for a time. All the tales are modified versions of ancient Greek myths with familiar names such as Perseus, King Midas, Pandora, Heracles, Bellerophon. Hawthorne described his aim in writing the book as ‘substituting a tone (in the Grecian myths) in some degree Gothic or romantic, or any such tone as may please myself, instead of the classic coldness, which is as repellent as the touch of marble… and, of course, I shall purge out all the old heathen wickedness, and put in a moral wherever practicable.’