The Marble Faun

Hawthorne's final novel is a provocative look at American artists abroad and a groundbreaking exploration of the influence of European thought on American morality that anticipates the work of Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, among others. The story of the mysterious, tormented Miriam, her friends Kenyon and Hilda, their alluring Italian acquaintance, the faunlike Donatello, and the crime that irrevocably links them all is, says Peter Robb, "a surprising drama, one that recalls nothing so much as American noir of a hundred years later .