Founded in 1971 by Michael Hart, Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books. The project's goal is to make information, books and other materials available to the general public in a format that the vast majority of people can easily read, use, quote and search. Project Gutenberg's online catalog includes over 20,000 electronic texts.

The name of the project, of course, implies that the ability to distribute texts electronically is as significant an achievement as the invention of movable type printing. Not convinced? Over two million electronic texts are downloaded each month ... at absolutely no cost. That figure now includes my own download of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse.

A graduate of Bowdoin College, Nathaniel Hawthorne is arguably the father of the modern English-language short story, and not coincidentally, one of my favorite writers. You've likely read something by him before, so you may have already discovered that his language is appropriate for the early part of the nineteenth century—which is to say that it's somewhat archaic by contemporary standards—and that his plots sometimes develop agonizingly slowly (if at all). But if you can get past all that, you'll be rewarded with some of the most clever and imaginative stories in American letters.

Although famous for his Salem, Massachusetts roots, Hawthorne temporarily called Concord home in the early 1840s. In 1846, he published Mosses from an Old Manse, a collection of short stories, many of which were composed during the three years that he and his wife lived in "The Old Manse," a house built by Ralph Waldo Emerson's father that overlooks the Concord River.

Collections of Hawthorne short stories usually attempt to represent the entirety of his work ... which is fine, except that I always feel like I'm reading "Nathaniel Hawthorne's Greatest Hits." So here are 12 stories from Mosses from an Old Manse; stories from other publications are not included. (Though the collection still isn't quite like the one Hawthorne himself published—the original version had 26 stories.)

If you're looking for a starting point, you may not want to begin with "The Old Manse." It's a 10,000-word introduction to the collection that discusses the various details of his home. If you haven't read them yet, try "The Birthmark," "Young Goodman Brown" or Rappaccini's Daughter." Those first three are pretty solid:

Mosses from an Old Manse
The Old Manse
The Birthmark
Young Goodman Brown
Rappaccini's Daughter
Mrs. Bullfrog
The Celestial Railroad
The Procession of Life
Feathertop: A Moralized Legend
Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent
Drowne's Wooden Image
Roger Malvin's Burial
The Artist of the Beautiful