These volumes begin with Hawthorne as US consul in Liverpool for four years. Then he lived in Rome and Florence for two, and came back to England for a year to write The Marble Faun, before returning to the Wayside in Concord permanently in 1860. During the four years that remained to him he struggled to write another romance, but succeeded only in producing Our Old Home. His letters for these last eleven years of his life reveal his recognition, finally, by the American and British literary communities as a major author, and his occasional willingness to play the role of man of letters. They also reveal his painful confrontations with the shock of the American Civil War, and of his own mortality.