Hawthorne's predilection for the mode of ‘Romance’ was undoubtedly one of the main factors in leading him towards the short story form. Romance, as understood by Hawthorne and later by Henry James, encourages an imaginative freedom with ordinary everyday circumstance and also a higher degree of metaphoric meaning, symbolism and allegory, and it can be argued that these elements are more easily embodied in the short story or tale than in the novel. It could even be argued that the greatest of Hawthorne's novels, The Scarlet Letter, is essentially an expanded short story, or at least a novella. The central image of the woman with the A embroidered on her dress was, in fact, first sketched by Hawthorne in the short story ‘Endicott and the Red Cross’ (1837), where the woman is the last and most suggestive figure in a sketch of various guilty individuals in the town of Salem ‘whose punishment would be lifelong’. The central symbol of the letter, with its moral paradox, is the heart of the novel, ‘the idea as hero’.

Hawthorne began his career as a writer of short pieces. His first published short story ‘The Hollow of the Three Hills’, appeared in The Salem Gazette in 1830, and throughout the thirties and forties a host of stories followed in that and other magazines like The Token, The New England Magazine and The Democratic Review. His first book collections of the stories were Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Twice-Told Tales (Second Series) (1842).