The stories Hawthorne published anonymously in magazines over a dozen years and then collected at last under his own name: the minister who puts on a black veil and will not explain, the man who steps out of his life for twenty years to watch it from across the street, the ambitious guest. Poe reviewed the book and announced that its author was a genius; Hawthorne said the tales had been written in a lonely chamber by a man who had no one to talk to.