Nathaniel Hawthorne’s American Notebooks are part diary, part depositary of ideas for future fiction. He also uses them to flex his writerly muscles in describing day-to-day observations. And they provide, inadvertently, the equivalent of a mobile phone location tracker when he refers to places where he was living or visiting. The notebooks span the years 1835 to 1853 but are far from comprehensive - with no entries for the years 1845 to 1849. Sometimes several entries are only days apart and about the same location. It's as if he's trying to fix a place on paper and that no particular entry satisfies him so he must try again by adding more detail or improving his previous work: Blue Hill in Milton, at the distance of several miles, actually glistens with rich, dark light, -no, not glistens, nor gleams -but perhaps to say glows subduedly will be a truer expression for it. Earlier in the same entry, he puts it more generally: No la...