Complete and unabridged, with 38 full-page plates by Albert Bierstadt, John Frederick Kensett and George Inness. Six more Greek myths retold for children in a New England drawing room — Theseus and the Minotaur, Antaeus and the Pygmies, Circe's palace, the dragon's teeth, the golden fleece. Hawthorne wrote them a year after A Wonder Book, keeping the same fictional student narrator and the same refusal to make the gods dignified. The Circe chapter is the strongest and the least suitable, which is why children remember it. Thirty-eight paintings from the century after Hawthorne, ranging from Bierstadt and Bradford's Arctic and Western scenes to New England summers and family gardens, supply a matching American landscape for each myth.
