Featured on PDR in the collection Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales, illustrated by Virginia Frances Sterrett (1921)

The Wonder-book for Boys and Girls (1851), along with its sequel The Tanglewood Tales (1852), were an attempt by the celebrated novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne — author of The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851) — to turn the Greek myths into something entertaining and edifying to young readers. It worked. The Wonder-book sold 4667 copies in its first two months. By comparison Moby Dick, which was published in the same month, sold less than 1800 copies in its first year. (Herman Melville had actually dedicated Moby Dick to Hawthorne — the intense friendship of the two writers has been brilliantly told by Philip Hoare in Leviathan, or the Whale [2008]).