Richard Harter Fogle's earlier work, Hawthorne's Fiction: The Light and the Dark, has become a standard resource for both scholars and general readers who wish to gain an understanding of American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne - a complex and challenging literary figure.              
This book, designed as a companion volume, concentrates on Hawthorne's use of imagery, specifically sun imagery, with its contrasting images of moonlight, artificial light, shadow, and blackness, to unify his narratives and illuminate his characters. In tracing Hawthorne's imagic pattern through his major fiction works and critical pieces, Professor Fogle amply reinforces his critical judgment that Hawthorne was not only an artist but also a careful, conscious craftsman.              
This book, in every sense a work of original and creative scholarship, is destined to join Hawthorne's Fiction as an indispensable guide to one of America's greatest writers.