"Archibald Malmaison" was offered
seven years ago to all the leading publishers in New York and Boston, and
was promptly refused by all. Since its recent appearance here, however, it
has had a circulation larger perhaps than that of all my other stories
combined. But that is one of the accidents that neither author nor
publisher can foresee. It was the horror of "Archibald Malmaison," not any
literary merit, that gave it vogue,--its horror, its strangeness, and its
brevity.
On Guy Fawkes's day, 1880, I began "Fortune's Fool,"--or "Luck," as it was
first called,--and wrote the first ten of the twelve numbers in three
months. I used to sit down to my table at eight o'clock in the evening and
write till sunrise. But the two remaining instalments were not written and
published until 1883, and this delay and its circumstances spoiled the
book. In the interval between beginning and finishing it another long
novel--"Dust"--was written and published. I returned to America in 1882,
after an absence in Europe far longer than I had anticipated or desired. I
trust I may never leave my native land again for any other on this planet.
"Beatrix Randolph," "Noble Blood," and "Love--or a Name," are the novels
which I have written since my return; and I also published a biography,
"Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife.
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