Nathaniel Hawthorne 
The Ancestral Footstep (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) 

Hawthorne struggled in vain to complete this fragment of a romance for more than twenty years. Based on an old English legend of a bloody footprint, it illuminates many of the themes Hawthorne touched on in his greatest works, as well as his methods of composition. It was published posthumously in 1883.

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Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was an American novelist and short-story writer whose works were notable for their strong moral focus, hatred of hypocrisy, and a use of symbolism so lush and romantic as to almost constitute in itself a counter-argument to any morality but art for art’s sake. His best known work is The Scarlet Letter (1850).