A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys

This book retells Greek myths for children in Hawthorne's own gentle, playful style. The stories, including Midas and the golden touch, Perseus and the Gorgon, and Pandora's box, are told by a young student named Eustace Bright to a circle of cousins in the Berkshire countryside. Hawthorne adds humor, lively detail and a nineteenth-century moral sense to the ancient tales. The book was popular in its day and helped make classical myth a part of American children's reading.